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Sheamus & Badger & Cesaro & Jericho & Big E & Enzo & Tyson Kidd & Nattie &Khaleesi & Coco

Kerrie74

Adult Guinea Pig
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Badger - We had to have Badger put to sleep in February (21/02/15), we still don't know what was wrong with her but when I told explained her symptoms to someone they thought it might have been an ovarian cyst or a UTI.



Sheamus - My favourite guinea pig out of all, he was a lovely little boy who we adopted just over a year ago, he was ill several times, sadly we had to have him put to sleep today (12/04/15) because he had gotten too ill to have surgery to remove bladder stones. If only the vet had done the op straight away.



Rip Sheamus and Badger. We will miss you and always love you.
 
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I am so sorry for the loss of your piggies, it is always so hard to lose them. Bladder Stones are quite difficult depending on where they are and as with any surgery it may not have made the difference so please don't torture yourself with 'what if's' You made the choice to PTS and sometimes that is the last act of love we can do for our piggies. I am so sorry for your pain and loss. Hugs x

RIP Sheamus & Badger
x x
 
I'm so sorry for your losses :( Popcorn free little ones x
 
I am ever so sorry that you are having such a bad run. It really whacks you, doesn't it? Please don't lose your self-belief; you are still a very good and caring piggy mummy who is putting the wellbeing of her furries before her own feelings and pain!

Sadly, guinea pigs can lose weight very quickly when they are in acute pain from a bladder stone. :(
My tiny Ceri went from 700g on the Friday down to 540g on the Monday with a mystery weight loss caused by a "silent" stone with no other symptoms while we were away on a short holiday for my 50th birthday. I had to give permission for the high risk op to go ahead standing by the side of an Amsterdam canal. I am forever grateful to @furryfriends Excellent Adventure Sanctuary for going WAY beyond the call of any boarder in taking Ceri on at the last minute, getting her an emergency appointment with one of the best operating vets in the whole country as soon as possible after the weekend and nursing her back to health in my absence; in any other hands or with another vet, Ceri would have faced exactly the same fate as Sheamus and I would have been in the same situation as you with Badger. It was very much a miracle that she did make it through in view of her advanced age, tiny weight and having the most enormous (large rabbit size) stone.

I am ever so sorry that there wasn't any better timing or a happy ending for you with either piggy. :(

RIP Badger and Seamus, both much loved, cherished and very much missed!
 
Thanks @Wiebke It's actually put me off adopting another Guinea Pig to go with Big E.

I had a good bond with Sheamus because of how many times he was ill last year, maybe he was just a poorly little piggie, I was also told he would have had them for a while, not sure how long a while is but it does make sense, each time he went to the vets he seem to have lost weight, as I stated in another post my son did point this out to one of the vets he went to see who shrugged it off and said he has a fast metabolism but actually it was the fact he had stones. I can't help thinking that if I had taken him to the PDSA from the start of his bottom getting impacted that he might be here now. Feel very fed up today.
 
So sorry for your losses... As some already said, you did your best, so please, don't torture yourself or anything like that, because you made the right decision. Sending tons of hugs and stregth to you.
 
Such very sad news, but as @Wiebke says, they can go downhill and lose weight so incredibly quickly when they have bladder stones. It was scary just how quickly the weight was coming off Wiebke's piggy while she was staying with me, and I literally counted down the hours until the vets were open on the Monday morning, and I could get her in for operation.

Please don't be put off adopting any more piggies, as you clearly have so much love to give. You will know when you feel ready to do so though xx
 
Thanks @Wiebke It's actually put me off adopting another Guinea Pig to go with Big E.

I had a good bond with Sheamus because of how many times he was ill last year, maybe he was just a poorly little piggie, I was also told he would have had them for a while, not sure how long a while is but it does make sense, each time he went to the vets he seem to have lost weight, as I stated in another post my son did point this out to one of the vets he went to see who shrugged it off and said he has a fast metabolism but actually it was the fact he had stones. I can't help thinking that if I had taken him to the PDSA from the start of his bottom getting impacted that he might be here now. Feel very fed up today.

Don't push it right now while you are in no way ready to deal with anything! You need to first digest what has happened; Sheamus' passing has re-opened the wound from your loss of Badger, so in effect you have not only to deal with the repercussions of losing your epic battle for Seamus, but also to cope with what is in effect a double loss. You create an incredibly close bond with any ill piggy, and when it is no longer there, it is like a part of you and your daily life has just disappeared. it is not just painful, but very disorientating.
Right now, on a very physical basis all the adrenalin is running out of your body and you are feeling drained, mauled and strained from all the emotional and physical exploits of the last weeks. It has been such a rollercoaster ride for you. You can't just set this aside and move on. Give yourself time to grieve and your body to time to recover and heal. Unless Big E is acutely pining and stopping to eat, he'll hold for a little while.

Under the circumstances, you have made absolutely the right decision; the one I would have also made in your place, and with the same pain in my soul. I have made the decision to pts when a vet didn't feel positive about an operation and I have also suffered through the wracking of guilt that has come with losing a piggy in what was supposed to be a fairly straight forward operation according to the vet or to complications after an operation (and one of them was to bladder trauma in the wake of a stone op).

What counts in the long term is that you have put Seamus' quality of life first; you have NOT let him down or betrayed him. By far not every bladder piggy suffers a weight loss as extreme as Seamus or Ceri, so that is not something that you or your vet could have foreseen. You were just very unlucky in that respect and also in that his symptoms were not the obvious ones. It would be so much easier if we didn't have to feel our way through an illness like a blindfolded person in a maze and could just swap hindsight with foresight!

I am very sorry if I have inadvertedly made your grief worse.

HUGS
 
Thank you @Wiebke & @furryfriends Excellent Adventure Sanctuary I suffer with health problems, mental and physical and it's my pets that cheer me up the most and of course my son, we've sat and had some chuckles over all of the guinea pigs, we've enjoyed looking after them and watching them become happy little piggies. We have a dog as well who seemed to have a little bond with Sheamus as well, he would give him a lick and Sheamus would go to him when he was out on the floor with Big's, he'd go and hide under Calam's food/water bowls (the bowls are in a bracket, the dog had an accident a couple of years ago so we raised his bowls when he was finding it hard to eat). I think I'm mentally tired of loosing things or rather people/pets that I love, what's actually the off putting part is the watching them in pain and not being able to do anything about it.

There was no real warning signs from Sheamus, just the weight loss, he seemed to be eating and drinking, in fact he used to eat more than Bigs and Bigs is a big boy lol. When I did notice the weight loss as I keep saying my son pointed it out to the vet. I'm trying not to feel bad because I know that I did try and get him seen to about anything that I thought was wrong with him, his eye (he had a small patch on one), weight, claws etc. I know it's hard for a vet to say "Oh yea he'll be ok until the operate" or "no we had better do it now" because maybe she wasn't expecting him to lose weight so fast, but I do wish those other vets had looked at him properly and took my son seriously when he took Sheamus.

Here's something funny or not funny really that I just read, now I've seen some say that guinea's don't drink a lot and yet I was looking at the rescue site where I adopted Sheamus, Big's and Snow from and that says they do drink a lot of water?

Big E seems ok at the moment, my son Aidan fed him earlier and said he was eating hay, we'll keep an eye on him though, he's not one for being picked up though, he seems to chatter his teeth for whatever reason and starts moaning.

Thanks again for the kind words, I appreciate it.
 
I mean to say, the closest vet for guinea pigs is Derby for us :/ We're in Nottingham (that's what it says on the vet finder).
 
I mean to say, the closest vet for guinea pigs is Derby for us :/ We're in Nottingham (that's what it says on the vet finder).

You have been through a lot, and it is difficult to make sense of so much at the best of times. It can throw even the healthiest and most confident of us. I was quite a bit of a wreck a year ago after losing three of my middle aged piggy unexpectedly within a month, two of them just a week apart to unrelated causes. I then went on to lose another four older ones over the course of the whole year and it was a very depressing and painful experience.

Watching a beloved one in pain and suffering without being able to help is one of the most awful things.

As I have pointed out before (not sure whether it is on yours or somebody else's thread), drinking little can be one contributing factor, but there are a lot of others; there are also stones with different compositions, so it is by far not as easy or straight forward as you may think. How stones form and what contributes to their formation has not yet been researched properly, so we still have to go by trial and error on what works and what not. :mal:
If it is any consolation for you, Ceri wasn't showing any other signs either, and had she not been so lucky as to be with Debbie in Northampton, her stone would have easily been missed by my local Coventry vets and an operation under the circumstances would have well been out of their scope. On the other hand, I would not have to have her pts because of severe, painful bloat some months later... If I'd known that, my decision to risk such a knife's edge operation might have likely been different. :(

You can't know everything and you can only ever make imperfect decisions based on your best knowledge and intent at the time. That is not going to change however good the vets are or become in the future. What is not going to change is the love you bring into a piggy's life, however short or long it is. That is enduring. It is your love and care that have made your piggies' life happy and well worth living. We cannot change illness and bad stuff happening, but we can determine how much love and support we give - and that makes the crucial difference in a pet's life!
 
Sorry for your losses too @Wiebke I understand and I'm sure I'll be ok eventually, I'm just missing my little buddy, I used to have little cuddles with him in bed or on the sofa, he would doze off on me as well, there's only one of our other piggies that do that and that's Cocoa who is also a lovely little piggie, she's stroppy but lovely lol.
 
Sorry for your losses too @Wiebke I understand and I'm sure I'll be ok eventually, I'm just missing my little buddy, I used to have little cuddles with him in bed or on the sofa, he would doze off on me as well, there's only one of our other piggies that do that and that's Cocoa who is also a lovely little piggie, she's stroppy but lovely lol.

that is what you often miss most - all the little shared bits that have made your bond so special. The craving to hold or stroke your piggy again can be quite physical at times, and it can happen long after you have lost yuor piggy.

Right now you are at the worst point where it is really sinking in and all the soul searching that is so typical for the onset of grieving process is at its worst. Sadly there is no shortcut. Sometimes it helps knowing that is is a normal phase and that some of your misery is caused by physical processes can help you to cope a little bit better whenever it threatens to overwhelm you. Make sure that you have got a good cry whenever you need one.
 
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