Flower_Girl
Junior Guinea Pig
Please bear with me with this post, I feel so lost and helpless at the moment in this situation, I'm hoping that someone might have some suggestions as to what this might be or what I can do to help my little pig. I tried to include as much detail as possible.
My 6 year old sow Indy has been having respiratory problems for about 2 months now. I've seen two different exotics vets - they both believed it was most likely a URI and she has been on various antibiotics now for the past month, with no improvement. Her breathing has got worse, and I'm at such a loss as to what to do. My vet is away until after Christmas but she has recommended an x-ray and steroids as the next course of action, as she now believes it may be a mass growing in Indy's upper respiratory tract which is partially blocking her airways.
At the beginning of this, Indy seemed completely unaffected by the breathing but it the past couple of weeks she has become much quieter and has now stopped eating hay completely. She will eat veggies, pellets, oats and treats, but I have been trying to top her up every day with critical care, and have also been giving 2-3ml Fibreplex daily on the advice of both vets as her poos have been very small/irregular over the past few weeks. Her breathing is now very noisy a lot of the time and often seems laboured and irregular, which again my vet thinks is due to a possible mass growing higher up.
It started out as an occasional raspy sort of breathing, it wasn't laboured at all and she seemed otherwise completely normal. She was put on 0.6ml Baytril/day for five days with Metacam (0.3ml/day) for three days, which seemed to sort it out and her breathing returned completely to normal, but a week after stopping the Baytril the rasping came back.
The vet then put her on a 3 week course of Ronaxan, but after about a week of this the breathing got a lot louder. My vet was away so I took her to a different vet who wanted to put her back on the Baytril (0.36ml/day) for a week. I went back a week later with no change and he added Septrin (0.26ml twice daily) and told me to carry on with the Baytril (at 0.32ml/day). After another week without change I went back to my original vet.
From what she can hear, the vet doesn't think there's a heart problem, and she doesn't think Indy's lungs sound particularly bad. She has had me start Indy on Metacam again and has upped the Baytril dose to the original 0.6ml once a day from last Wednesday. She recommended nebulising Indy 2-3 times daily with F10 and Bisolvon which I have been doing since Saturday. However, she has said that she doesn't believe this is an infection so this is just a final "making sure" that it's not a URI.
Going from other advice/posts I've seen on here and other sites I thought it might be heart related, but neither of the vets I've seen have thought this is very likely. I know I need to see another vet soon - my vet has said that her colleague will see me while she's away and would be willing to do a concious x-ray/prescribe steroids as per her instructions but I feel like at this point I'm not really happy to see a non-exotics vet as we don't actually know for sure what this is. But I don't know if that's the right call either.
Just don't know what to do at this point, any suggestions?
My 6 year old sow Indy has been having respiratory problems for about 2 months now. I've seen two different exotics vets - they both believed it was most likely a URI and she has been on various antibiotics now for the past month, with no improvement. Her breathing has got worse, and I'm at such a loss as to what to do. My vet is away until after Christmas but she has recommended an x-ray and steroids as the next course of action, as she now believes it may be a mass growing in Indy's upper respiratory tract which is partially blocking her airways.
At the beginning of this, Indy seemed completely unaffected by the breathing but it the past couple of weeks she has become much quieter and has now stopped eating hay completely. She will eat veggies, pellets, oats and treats, but I have been trying to top her up every day with critical care, and have also been giving 2-3ml Fibreplex daily on the advice of both vets as her poos have been very small/irregular over the past few weeks. Her breathing is now very noisy a lot of the time and often seems laboured and irregular, which again my vet thinks is due to a possible mass growing higher up.
It started out as an occasional raspy sort of breathing, it wasn't laboured at all and she seemed otherwise completely normal. She was put on 0.6ml Baytril/day for five days with Metacam (0.3ml/day) for three days, which seemed to sort it out and her breathing returned completely to normal, but a week after stopping the Baytril the rasping came back.
The vet then put her on a 3 week course of Ronaxan, but after about a week of this the breathing got a lot louder. My vet was away so I took her to a different vet who wanted to put her back on the Baytril (0.36ml/day) for a week. I went back a week later with no change and he added Septrin (0.26ml twice daily) and told me to carry on with the Baytril (at 0.32ml/day). After another week without change I went back to my original vet.
From what she can hear, the vet doesn't think there's a heart problem, and she doesn't think Indy's lungs sound particularly bad. She has had me start Indy on Metacam again and has upped the Baytril dose to the original 0.6ml once a day from last Wednesday. She recommended nebulising Indy 2-3 times daily with F10 and Bisolvon which I have been doing since Saturday. However, she has said that she doesn't believe this is an infection so this is just a final "making sure" that it's not a URI.
Going from other advice/posts I've seen on here and other sites I thought it might be heart related, but neither of the vets I've seen have thought this is very likely. I know I need to see another vet soon - my vet has said that her colleague will see me while she's away and would be willing to do a concious x-ray/prescribe steroids as per her instructions but I feel like at this point I'm not really happy to see a non-exotics vet as we don't actually know for sure what this is. But I don't know if that's the right call either.
Just don't know what to do at this point, any suggestions?
