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Swollen grease gland and lump

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Nienna

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[FONT=Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif]Hi everyone

I have a 3 year old piggy called Gizmo who the vet is unable to give me an answer on. He is researching tonight but admits to not being a guinea pig expert and I'm worried he may do more harm than good. I am getting this query onto forums and am also going to phone Cambridge Cavy Trust in the morning for some more advice.

Gizmo has what looks like a swollen grease gland. You can see a picture here (Gizmo is in a funny position - his testicles are in the bottom left hand corner to give you an idea of what part of the pig you are looking at, and then he is curled round to the left in a sort of reclined position):

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If you look at the picture, the larger pink part is the grease gland itself, and then the area around it seems to be enlarged to about the diameter of a 5p piece and about 2cm high. There are two small lumps to the left of the gland that you can see in the picture. The skin the gland is sitting on isn't warm and he has no worries about me touching it. The gland itself looks pink and normal but a bit enlarged - no redness or crusty bits.

So far I have cleaned the whole area with swarfega, bathed Gizmo (which he hates so I feel bad now!) and then I have tried putting some vitamin e oil on the lump in case there is anything in there that needs drawing out. This seems to have worked to bring it down a touch but I might be seeing things.

The vet as I said has no idea but he wanted to do a needle biopsy as he thinks it might be a tumour. I'm not keen on this idea as it all seems to be related to the gland and has come up fairly quickly. I'm thinking looking at it that there may be a blockage and the white lumps have developed in the same way that if you get a spot on a spot in humans, the contents of the original spot are breaking out elsewhere.

I noticed this on saturday and took him to the vet today. He's not changed anything in his behaviour. He still begs for food, runs up and down his ramp and relaxes/lies down. His poops and pee is completely normal and his appetite/water intake is the same. To my knowledge he has had this swelling and lump for at least three days now and probably longer in the time it would have taken to form.

Has anyone seen anything like this before? I can only theorise and I don't want the vet to go down a standardised route of sticking a needle in it if someone can offer an explaination.

I've just lost a piggy 5 months ago to maluclusion and a digestive tract problem that we nursed him through with 2 months of hand feeding, so I'm freaking out a little bit. Gizzi is a real mummy's pig and I feel like I'm letting him down by not being able to find an answer which makes it worse!

Thanks in advance![/FONT]
 
Sorry - I haven't got an answer. From your descritpion, it doesn't look like an abscess.

here is the link to http://www.guinealynx.info/lumps.html, but I don't think it will give you the info you're after.

Wishing Gizmo all the best! I know myself how hard it is to lose a piggy after such a battle - and it's not something you want go there ever again!
 
Thanks Wiebke. I've checked guinea lynx already and posted in there too. It's really weird - the vet doesn't know, I'm guessing, and I even took him to see the lady that we had our new rescue pig from in case she's seen it and she has no idea either!

Any thoughts greatfully received!
 
Wait until some of our more medically experienced members come on. They usually look in at least once a day. Perhaps alcesterpigs has come across it at some point.
 
Will do - I was hoping alcesterpigs would turn up - I've been looking through and seen some good advice from those posts
 
It is difficult, if not impossible, to tell what it is from the photo,
I would take a chance and say that it is not a malignant tumour, if only because they are uncommon in pigs.
Another guess, educated or otherwise, would be that it is a sebaceous cyst.
Reason; your description of white lumps.
I have removed a number of cysts which fit what you have described. They are usually like that if they have been present for some time and have broken through the skin.
For want of a better desription they look like pig's pudding where you can see the little lumps of fat, not that the white lumps in a cyst are fat.
I just hope everyone knows what pig's pudding is, you don't see it for sale so often these days.
 
Thanks so much!

Obviously none of us can say for certain what is happening without a vet looking at him in person but everything that I am reading seems to be coming back to a sebaceous cyst (which at least helps me to sleep tonight if nothing else!).

The good news is that I have found another vet via the vet thread posted in this forum - thanks so much for making this available - and I am phoning tomorrow for an appointment with them. Our vets are lovely but they have mainly experience with cats and dogs and you always seem to see a different person. Also as this vet didn't know what a grease gland was and I had to give him a quick crash course via GL makes me not too comfortable letting him proceed.

The vet I've found has over 20 years experience with small animals as a speciality and in their most recent newsletter they have GP general advice as an article so I feel a lot more confident taking Gizzi to them. I'll take him along hopefully tomorrow and let you know how he gets on.
 
Gizzi now has an appointment at www.lucasvets.co.uk from the vet thread on this site tomorrow morning. Hopefully she'll be able to get to the bottom of it as she's got over 20 years small animal experience and their practise is more geared towards small animals than our current one which is more cats and dogs.

Looked at the site which looked very good so am hopeful for tomorrow. I'll let you know how he gets on.

Thank goodness I'm on holiday this week! Good timing on Gizzi's part!
 
The mystery pig has been sorted! The vet had a look and confirmed that it is a sebeceous cyst. No treatment needed at the moment - all we need to do is keep the size of it down by squeezing and applying warm compresses which I think I'll do once a week. If it gets uncomfortable or bothers him then we might need to look at having it removed, but at the moment that isn't needed.

We have a 22 year old(!) Tonkinese cat (burmese / devon rex cross) as well who has a permenant cyst on his back that I have to clean and empty occasionally, so thankfully its something that we're used to. Gizzi's is much smaller and cleaner though so I'm hoping that a bit of management will keep it under control.

The vet I saw was very good. If anyone is in the Bristol area I would recommend them. It took her about 30 seconds to confirm what the problem was, whereas the other vet still hasn't rung me back with an answer (and charged me £17 for the appt!) I'm moving all our piggy care over to Lucas Vets as of now - they even had a book on Tonkinese cats in the waiting room that impressed me, as a lot of people have not heard of the breed.
 
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