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Elderly piggy has lost use of her back legs

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Amy89

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Hello!
I own two elderly guinea pigs - Honey (7 years and) and Pippin (8). Over the last few months both have slowly lost the use of their back legs, and tend to drag them around behind them. They can both still get around fine, although over the last few days Honey has become worse and one of her legs doesn't appear to move at all. Honey has also lost of lot of weight over the last few months, which we assume is due to a tumour or something similar as she has continued to eat normally. I'm not sure if her legs have become worse due to a lack of muscle or whether it is something else. I assume this problem is unlikely to be due to a calcium/vitamin C deficiency as their legs did not suddenly become paralysed overnight.

Any advice would be very helpful! :)

Amy x
 
As it is a slow loss of movement, I would check whether they have too little vitamin C in their diet or their absorbsion is disturbed. Please have them seen by a competent vet to find the right cause and prescribe the right treatment! There could be other causes.
http://www.guinealynx.info/scurvy.html

A sudden drop of calcium causes overnight paralysis.
 
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One of my piggies was fine one day then her back end was paralysed the next. We took her to the vets who prescribed antibiotics incase of infection, told us to do physio on her and gave us metacam but said that it was rare that they recovered. After a week of the antibiotics, metacam for pain relief/to help with any inflammation, osteocare and the physio she improved and after a couple of weeks was back to normal and has been absolutely fine for months now. As your piggie is alot older it could just be down to her age, but I'd still take her to the vets, maybe mention to them the possibility of using osteocare ( I always ask my vet about human medication before starting the piggies on them to make sure they're safe ) and see if theres anything they can do as I know it's distressing to see them that way, even though I think it affects us more than them!
 
My guinea pig lost the use of her legs suddenly two days ago. She had an Xray yesterday and the vet is very confused onto what happened. This has been very reassuring. Is there any chance you could describe the physio that was recommended? Thank you in advance :)
 
marblemoo said:
My guinea pig lost the use of her legs suddenly two days ago. She had an Xray yesterday and the vet is very confused onto what happened. This has been very reassuring. Is there any chance you could describe the physio that was recommended? Thank you in advance :)
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This is an old thread. Please start your own thread, making use of the green "start new thread" button on the top left when you click on health/illness. You will get more answers that way.

I hope that your girl will recover soon! Gentle massage can help; most piggies will recover. There is sadly virtually no research for guinea pigs, and very little for rabbits, so you can only treat for symptoms.

Here is the Peter Gurney link: http://www.oginet.com/pgurney/paral.htm
 
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