Still bleeding?

[CrazyHairedPiggies997]

Hi guys!
Pumpkin had surgery to remove the stone stuck in her urethra, which then turned out to be 2 stones! She managed the light GA fine. She is back to her normal mischievous self! She’s having metacam and baytril for 5 days to be safe.
My question is, she is still bleeding when she wees. The RVN explained she may do for a few days as the area is irritated and she possibly has a slight tare, but how long would you guys leave it before you were worried? Or is this normal & has it happened to yours? Let me know! I’ll try and insert some photos. The stone was huge!

 

[Wiebke]

Hi guys!
Pumpkin had surgery to remove the stone stuck in her urethra, which then turned out to be 2 stones! She managed the light GA fine. She is back to her normal mischievous self! She’s having metacam and baytril for 5 days to be safe.
My question is, she is still bleeding when she wees. The RVN explained she may do for a few days as the area is irritated and she possibly has a slight tare, but how long would you guys leave it before you were worried? Or is this normal & has it happened to yours? Let me know! I’ll try and insert some photos. The stone was huge!

Hi!

Light bleeding can still happen in the first few days after an operation from the damage to the bladder (bladder trauma) until the natural healing process gets fully underway from day 2-3. As long as your girl is OK in herself and not getting any worse I would not worry. you should hopefully see a big improvement as soon as the healing process is setting in fully, just from the sheer relief of having that stone out.
Here are our post-op care tips: Tips For Post-operative Care

What you should do is review your diet, especially re. filtering the water and reducing the daily pellet intake to 15 ml (1 tablespoon or 1/8 cup). These are the two biggest areas calcium comes into the diet but most owners are only concentrating on the veg. You can't cut all calcium out of the diet as that is long term as damaging as well so you have to find the right balance.
Here are our diet tips. If your piggy is not an avid drinker (most bladder piggies aren't), please make sure that you include a good measure of fluid rich veg like cucumber, lettuce, celery or fresh green growing grass in the diet to help flush the bladder regularly and miminise the risk of another build-up. The calcium absorption process is rather complex; it depends what is going wrong with it. Diet is the best way to prevent another one in the longer term. It takes however some weeks until the changes have worked their way through the body. The more closely the diet resembles their original diet of mainly grass/hay with some forage for trace elements, the better.
Here is the link: Long Term Balanced General And Special Needs Guinea Pig Diets

The other area where you can really help with the comfort and healing is with glucosamine support. This is not a medication but a food supplement, so most vets won't prescribe it. However, the walls of the bladder are coated with glucosamine to prevent the corrosive urine coming into the contact with raw tissue. When a stone is banging round the bladder or urethra, then it is badly scratching that coat and irritating the bladder and the walls of the tubes. The glucosamine will help with that aspect and with the healing process in the urinary tract.
It really makes a difference in our long term and in my personal experience with bladder stone piggies!
We recommend to mix the contents of 1 capsule of Feliway cystease with 2 ml of water and then syringe 1 ml twice daily or 2 ml every 24 hours. Cats are the other species particularly prone to urinary tract problems. Cystease capsules are the easiest way of dosing the glucosamine. always shake well before use. Again, glucosamine needs a bit of time to build up in the body and is not an instant healer.

All the best with the recovery. Please take the time to read the links; your diet changes can really make the difference between more stones or no stones in the long term.

 

[CrazyHairedPiggies997]

Hi!

Light bleeding can still happen in the first few days after an operation from the damage to the bladder (bladder trauma) until the natural healing process gets fully underway from day 2-3. As long as your girl is OK in herself and not getting any worse I would not worry. you should hopefully see a big improvement as soon as the healing process is setting in fully, just from the sheer relief of having that stone out.
Here are our post-op care tips: Tips For Post-operative Care

What you should do is review your diet, especially re. filtering the water and reducing the daily pellet intake to 15 ml (1 tablespoon or 1/8 cup). These are the two biggest areas calcium comes into the diet but most owners are only concentrating on the veg. You can't cut all calcium out of the diet as that is long term as damaging as well so you have to find the right balance.
Here are our diet tips. If your piggy is not an avid drinker (most bladder piggies aren't), please make sure that you include a good measure of fluid rich veg like cucumber, lettuce, celery or fresh green growing grass in the diet to help flush the bladder regularly and miminise the risk of another build-up. The calcium absorption process is rather complex; it depends what is going wrong with it. Diet is the best way to prevent another one in the longer term. It takes however some weeks until the changes have worked their way through the body. The more closely the diet resembles their original diet of mainly grass/hay with some forage for trace elements, the better.
Here is the link: Long Term Balanced General And Special Needs Guinea Pig Diets

The other area where you can really help with the comfort and healing is with glucosamine support. This is not a medication but a food supplement, so most vets won't prescribe it. However, the walls of the bladder are coated with glucosamine to prevent the corrosive urine coming into the contact with raw tissue. When a stone is banging round the bladder or urethra, then it is badly scratching that coat and irritating the bladder and the walls of the tubes. The glucosamine will help with that aspect and with the healing process in the urinary tract.
It really makes a difference in our long term and in my personal experience with bladder stone piggies!
We recommend to mix the contents of 1 capsule of Feliway cystease with 2 ml of water and then syringe 1 ml twice daily or 2 ml every 24 hours. Cats are the other species particularly prone to urinary tract problems. Cystease capsules are the easiest way of dosing the glucosamine. always shake well before use. Again, glucosamine needs a bit of time to build up in the body and is not an instant healer.

All the best with the recovery. Please take the time to read the links; your diet changes can really make the difference between more stones or no stones in the long term.

What a wonderful reply thank you so so so much!
So, I definitely have focused on her diet, she had 1/4th cup of Supreme Science grain free pellets (but doesn’t always eat them all) & she has water filtered through my Britta bottle ☺
Again, I’ve looked at her veg diet too, although I read celery is bad for calcium? So I haven’t given her much, I hope this isn’t the case and she LOVES it and would eat it all day if I let her, is it ok for her to have some daily? She also has pepper, littlegem or romaine, cucumbers, occasional carrot and apple & sometimes green beans but she rarely eats them! (She used to have much more variety than this but I’ve cut it back to things I thought were low calcium, it’s quite hard when you google as there is conflicting advice.

I’ll look into the glucosamine thank you, I’m guessing this has to be vegan/veggie friendly? Will just glaucosamine tablets be ok or is the cat cystease best?
thanks so much!

 

[Wiebke]

What a wonderful reply thank you so so so much!
So, I definitely have focused on her diet, she had 1/4th cup of Supreme Science grain free pellets (but doesn’t always eat them all) & she has water filtered through my Britta bottle ☺
Again, I’ve looked at her veg diet too, although I read celery is bad for calcium? So I haven’t given her much, I hope this isn’t the case and she LOVES it and would eat it all day if I let her, is it ok for her to have some daily? She also has pepper, littlegem or romaine, cucumbers, occasional carrot and apple & sometimes green beans but she rarely eats them! (She used to have much more variety than this but I’ve cut it back to things I thought were low calcium, it’s quite hard when you google as there is conflicting advice.

I’ll look into the glucosamine thank you, I’m guessing this has to be vegan/veggie friendly? Will just glaucosamine tablets be ok or is the cat cystease best?
thanks so much!

Please halve the pellet amount to 1/8 cup or 1 tablespoon (they are both 15 ml in volume while 1/4 cup is 30 ml). Be aware that even the best no added calcium brand still contains more calcium weight for weight than the veg highest in it (kale). Compared to hay, pellets also contain mostly fillers and rather little fibre. Pellets are the one part of diet that you can leave out if you compensate with some healthy forage so don't worry about going lightly on them!
Please also be aware that fresh grass is high in vitamin C and that it is also still present in good quality hay. It is the reason why guinea pigs never had the need to make their own vitamin C in the first place and why a piggy on a mainly hay based diet is not at risk of scurvy. Since grass and hay are not on a human menu, we have treated them as a kind of dietary non-entity for too long! But it also means that you do not have to worry about this aspect when reducing the amount of pellets drastically.

If you remove most of the calcium from the water and pellets, then you can give a little chunk of celery daily safely; especially if she is keen on it. My own piggies get it; and I haven't had a stone issue for 7 years. The last operation was an overhang from the period in 2012 when I was experimenting with the diet and at some point got the balance exactly wrong for a time, resulting in a spate of stone ops. But since I started filtering in 2013 and reducing the amount of pellets quite a lot, it has made all the difference - and I live in an area with hard water and high mineral water content!
Please make sure that you do not remove all calcium from the diet, but rather give it in veg form as the veg rich in magnesium are all also high in calcium but magnesium is not one of the things added to pellets. So things like a little kale or in the UK greens every now and then are actually good; the same goes for herbs. These foods take the place of the forage that roaming piggies would eat in order to supplement their diet.

You can basically give any variety of glucosamine but you need to crush any human pellets and then compute with how much water you need to mix the resulting powder as the tablets come in varying glucosamine contents, which is a multiple of what you want to give.
The mix tends to go off rather sooner so you are not always using the tablets optimally as they tend to provide more glucosamine per tablet. The cystease capsules have the advantage that you do not have to work out the correct mix and that you can prepare a mix for a day or two safely without wastage. Just open the capsule can shake out the powder inside, shake and wait until it has been absorbed by the water.

 

[CrazyHairedPiggies997]

Please halve the pellet amount to 1/8 cup or 1 tablespoon (they are both 15 ml in volume while 1/4 cup is 30 ml). Be aware that even the best no added calcium brand still contains more calcium weight for weight than the veg highest in it (kale). Compared to hay, pellets also contain mostly fillers and rather little fibre. Pellets are the one part of diet that you can leave out if you compensate with some healthy forage so don't worry about going lightly on them!
Please also be aware that fresh grass is high in vitamin C and that it is also still present in good quality hay. It is the reason why guinea pigs never had the need to make their own vitamin C in the first place and why a piggy on a mainly hay based diet is not at risk of scurvy. Since grass and hay are not on a human menu, we have treated them as a kind of dietary non-entity for too long! But it also means that you do not have to worry about this aspect when reducing the amount of pellets drastically.

If you remove most of the calcium from the water and pellets, then you can give a little chunk of celery daily safely; especially if she is keen on it. My own piggies get it; and I haven't had a stone issue for 7 years. The last operation was an overhang from the period in 2012 when I was experimenting with the diet and at some point got the balance exactly wrong for a time, resulting in a spate of stone ops. But since I started filtering in 2013 and reducing the amount of pellets quite a lot, it has made all the difference - and I live in an area with hard water and high mineral water content!
Please make sure that you do not remove all calcium from the diet, but rather give it in veg form as the veg rich in magnesium are all also high in calcium but magnesium is not one of the things added to pellets. So things like a little kale or in the UK greens every now and then are actually good; the same goes for herbs. These foods take the place of the forage that roaming piggies would eat in order to supplement their diet.

You can basically give any variety of glucosamine but you need to crush any human pellets and then compute with how much water you need to mix the resulting powder as the tablets come in varying glucosamine contents, which is a multiple of what you want to give.
The mix tends to go off rather sooner so you are not always using the tablets optimally as they tend to provide more glucosamine per tablet. The cystease capsules have the advantage that you do not have to work out the correct mix and that you can prepare a mix for a day or two safely without wastage. Just open the capsule can shake out the powder inside, shake and wait until it has been absorbed by the water.

My apologise I didn’t tell you correctly. She does in fact have 1/8th cup daily, NOT 1/4th, I got confused - sorry about that. That was one of the first changes I made! She also gets grass every day or every other day depending on my work schedule & weather, I just didn’t include this as I was mentioning veggies. I’ll definitely get the cystese then, thanks for that. Okay, I’ll allow her some celery as yes she loves it. Do the other veggies seem ok for daily? Xx

 

[Claire W]

Veg that can be fed daily include cucumber, pepper (all colours) green beans, coriander and lettuce (except iceberg) I feed little gem

 

[CrazyHairedPiggies997]

Veg that can be fed daily include cucumber, pepper (all colours) green beans, coriander and lettuce (except iceberg) I feed little gem

Wonderful! She gets all of those apart from coriander because the smell makes me want to vomit yes I either have little gem or romaine xx

 

[Claire W]

Wonderful! She gets all of those apart from coriander because the smell makes me want to vomit yes I either have little gem or romaine xx

That’s great

 

[CrazyHairedPiggies997]

The measuring cup I have says 1/8th is 30ml? So is that still too much? X

 

[Piggies&buns]

One tablespoon (which is the recommended daily portion of pellets) is 15ml

According to a quick online conversion I’ve just looked up, 1/8 cup is two US tablespoons. Which would account for why it says 30ml.
Cup measures, I believe, are more US measurements. I tend to use an actual tablespoon measure rather than converting from cups.

 

[CrazyHairedPiggies997]

Hi again,

she’s had another wee sample checked, it still contains blood and a small amount of calcium oxalate but quite a lot of phosphates, has anyonr had experience of this or have any advice?
Thanks x