Hi
HUGS
I am very sorry; especially when you have a number of piggies, deaths never happen nicely spaced out; illness, emergencies and deaths happen in clumps. Even more so when you have a number similarly aged piggies who hit older age at the same time.
As long as your piggies are not dying from the same addressable cause, you have to unfortunately accept. It is not your fault. You work through the grieving process that bit longer as you can process only so much at any given time. I call this 'grieving indigestion' when you have more sorrow on your plate than you can deal with because your pain continues without any end in sight while you are right in the middle of this digestion process with more heaped onto the plate before you can even start to make a dent...
You can unfortunately never choose when and what from your piggies die; that is not within your control. Try to think about having your pets on loan from above to give them as happy and fulfilled a life as you can; but that the load can be cancelled at any moment without further notice. Guinea pigs don't have a concept for average life expectancy. They measure a good life in happy days.
We should do the same because sharing those happy days and the love that connects us and living in the moment is what is making pet keeping so rewarding and helps us to come out ahead. Loss is the other side of the same coin, and - especially when we have a number of piggies or pets - never lose sight of the fact that pets are shorter lived than us and that they are a gift that will endure in its legacy of life enrichment and love but not in the flesh and fur.
Caring for Older Piggies and Facing the End - A practical and supportive information collection
You can support an ill piggy with syringe feed and medication but you cannot prevent a death from illness or the body closing down if the issue is beyond medical help or progressing too fast for any medication to kick in. With emergencies you are always very much up against it. Some you'll win, others you don't.
But you should - even in your own agony of heart - never withhold release from pain and suffering for the sake of your own fears and desires. When the chips are down, guinea pigs, for all their huge personalities, are only small animals with a much faster metabolism, which will turn against them in illness and death, as everything happens much faster, too.
What you can never do anything about is the curve balls that genetic issues, accidents, out of the blue illnesses and circumstantial bad timing re. vet access throw at you - piggies have a bad habit of choosing the worst possible moment for a life or death emergency in my own experience.
Here is our emergency and crisis care advice in addition to any necessary treatment that can sometimes help getting your piggies through a crisis but by far not always. It is however a crucial part in any recovery from a serious illness. The first link contains all the practical tips and information in just one link, so you do not have to scramble to find the necessary information when in a panic and in a hurry.
Emergency, Crisis and Bridging Care until a Vet Appointment (please bookmark)
All About Syringe Feeding and Medicating Guinea Pigs with Videos and Pictures
First Aid Kit: Easily available non-medication support products for an emergency
You can tweak a healthy life expectancy of 5-7 years for about 1-2 years in your favour to take more piggies to the upper half or even a little beyond with a good, grass hay/fresh grass based diet with a modicum of preferably green veg and just 1 tablespoon of pellets (since veg and pellets together only replace the supplementary role of wild forage in the diet guinea pigs have evolved on). If you are in the UK, you also want to filter your water in combination with reducing the pellet intake as those are the two largest calcium contributors if you have bladder stone issues. Please make sure that you introduce indoors piggies to fresh grass and the outdoors slowly after the winter and that you protect them with a full range of little measures in hot weather, which can quickly tip the balance especially for any frailer piggies and - with climate change in full swing - can kill directly or indirectly.
Long Term Balanced General And Special Needs Guinea Pig Diets
Feeding Grass And Preparing Your Piggies For Lawn Time
Hot Weather Management, Heat Strokes and Fly Strike
This in combination with weekly life-long health weight monitoring and body checks to catch developing issues early on, hopefully before they become a life or death emergency:
Weight - Monitoring and Management
Guinea pig body quirks - What is normal and what not?
Grieving is hard; especially multiple grieving. If you really struggle with accepting and processing your losses, please seek help. Pet bereavement can affect everybody and there is specially trained, free UK charity support out there. The best thing you can do for yourself is to talk it out with somebody who understands. I wish I had had that kind of help in earlier years when I had to figure it out all myself and come to terms with my own losses (single and multiple) all on my own. Any forum members making use of the Blue Cross services (often taking some persuasion) have come back with the comment that it has really helped them.
Here is our sensitive grieving guide with lots of practical advice and the link to the free Blue Cross pet berevement support services:
Human Bereavement: Grieving, Coping and Support Links for Guinea Pig Owners and Their Children
For the Blue Cross support platforms:
Pet bereavement and pet loss
I hope that this will help you? A stampede to the Rainbow Bridge leaves all of us reeling and doubting ourselves since humans are wired to reflect everything back on ourselves. It is also not helped that any new loss brings back the previous ones that are not yet fully digested; like ripping open a barely scabbed over wound.
Please take the time to read all the links in this thread. They contain all the detailed practical in-depth information and how-to advice that we cannot repeat at length in every single post we make, seeing what we all do this for free in our own free time.
You can find all the guide links in our much more comprehensive and extensive practical information resource into with our experiences from 15 years on this lively forum as well as our own owner experiences, reaching back in some cases to half a century, have gone into. Here is the link, which you may want to bookmark, browse, read and re-read at need:
Comprehensive Owners' Practical and Supportive Information Collection
PS: I lost 7 piggies last summer/autumn in just over 3 months, three of them very unexpectedly in just a week - and one of them (a three year old) just hours before the first available piggy savvy appointment I could bag after the weekend; so I fully understand how you feel!
That has unfortunately just been the start as my next big wodge of adoptees is turning 6 years over the course of year... so there is going to be another clump of deaths in waiting for me in the wings. This is however belanced out with pandemic coinciding with a generational gap so I have had an unprecedented 18 months without any deaths during the worst of it - the only good thing in that whole time. In the long term it really evens out but it is more in the way of floods and droughts than a steady rainfall.
