About 3 weeks ago I adopted 2 guinea pigs from the SPCA, Lili and Lilou sisters who are 3 years old. I planned to introduce them to my other 3 year old female Lottie but first I wanted to deal with health problems. Lilou has a pea-sized lump on the pinna of her ear (the outside of the soft ear flap), the SPCA vets determined it was an abscess and drained it, but by the time I adopted her it had filled up again with white material and formed a little head that looked like a blackhead. In my opinion, it looks like a sebaceous cyst, the material inside is a cream white and is kind of waxy cottage cheese consistency. My personal vet drained it yesterday and believes it to be an abscess as well. After draining it bled a bit and has since formed a scab, today my vet called me and wants to prescribe a common antibiotic in Canada, Chloramphenicol, but hasn't mentioned anything about me needing to flush the abscess from home. Lilou is a very scared and stressed guinea pig, I've yet to even see her venture out to use the water bottle. I'm worried about possible side effects of the antibiotic and needing to handle her daily to administer it and also give probiotics. Should I proceed with the antibiotic or just treat it like a cyst and wait to see how it progresses like my vet originally suggested before prescribing the meds today.
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Sebaceous Cyst or Abscess?
- Thread starter Viv52k
- Start date
Hello and welcome to the forum. I would follow the vets advice. As long as you are calm, she should be fine. Give her some coriander or grass to nibble on while you are doing it and maybe cover her with a towel. She should be fine.
If a vet has determined antibiotics are needed, then do give them. It may be upsetting for her to be handled when she isnt comfortable, but an untreated infection will be worse in the long run. She will get over being held for medication.
Hi!
Flushing an abscess on that site is near impossible; it is generally used for deep abscesses with several pockets that need quite some time to heal from the inside out but that are sitting too close to the surface or in a very delicate position for them to operated out. The antibiotic should hopefully do the trick if it is an abscess; please follow vet advice and do the full course.
Make sure that you have got feeding support at home in case she loses her appetite. It very much depends on the dosage and on the individual impact on the gut microbiome of a piggy. Most antibiotic cases go actually without a hitch but nobody finds it worth reporting a normal recovery.
All the best!
PS: Unfortunately, we cannot tell you for sure without access to your piggy whether you are dealing with an abscess or a sebaceous cyst. It is not necessarily as easy to distinguish between them.
It's more of a concern that there isn't anything to treat. From visual appearances I cant tell that there's an infection, no inflammation of the surrounding area or redness at all. There's no smell from the white material filling the lump either. I guess that it could be a very early on infection, in which case its best to start the antibiotics before it gets worst. But I just don't understand how the vets determined there's an infection if there's no signs and they didn't test anything. From videos of sebaceous cysts being drained it really seems to look like that, and the SPCA vets although they determined it was an abscess as well simply said to watch that it didn't increase in size. And at my original vet appointment, they only said that it would need to be emptied and in the future, we could completely remove it if I wanted. So I don't understand why that changed and now they're prescribing meds over the phone.
For the sake of diminishing the risk of any infection I'll be picking up the prescription, and we'll see what happens from there, hopefully it's nothing serious overall. I guess it's better for a bit of stomach upset than a full-blown infection down the road. Just wish we had more vets experienced in guinea pig care available, so I felt a bit more confident in their diagnoses.
Please follow the advice on the packet.