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Tallulah has an abscess :(

Here's the little bat-hippo bugger zonked on opiate painkillers with a big hole in her neck. The big hole is staying open overnight to let the seroma fluid drain. She probably scratched her neck with her back foot because the fluid oozing out felt funny, and helpfully made a hole big enough to drain it properly. Vets again at 10am tomorrow. They are still seeing her for free as part of her original post-op care, though we did pay £12 for a big buprenorphine injection to calm her down a bit... thats the lump near her back leg, where she had her injection!
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Just before we set off to the vet she was still trying to eat lunch with blood dripping down her face... she managed 12 pellets and 2 bits of kale too in the time it took to make the emergency phone call and grab the car keys!
I really hope she makes it through all this, but she's definitely a fighter...
 
Oh Tallulah you are so naughty.
But you have to love a piggy with so much personality, even if they give you grey hairs.
Hope she's OK.xx
 
Doing ok! Wound looks such a mess I kind of dont want to look, but she had a 4-hour drug-induced power-nap then just woke up and ate 4mls of recovery food and 2mls of probiotic. We've noticed that she loves her furry nose patch rubbing, and her ears- and she hates being touched anywhere else unless she's wrapped in a clean cotton tea towel. Not fleece, not a fluffy towel, she likes nice clean smooth cotton tea towels and handkerchiefs best! You learn so much about pets when they need nursing and you spend so much time with them, I feel like we know her so much better since she's been ill, I do hope she recovers...
 
And most of the dinner has disappeared, and the hay tray has been sat in, and there was a bat-hippo shape scurrying away when I went in to top up the hay and do the water bottles... please get well funny little hippo girl! There's just such a big hole in her neck... oozing all sorts of stuff... maybe @alpacasqueak 's Pedro and Tallulah should start a club for "feisty rodents with big surgical holes in but surviving"...
 
And most of the dinner has disappeared, and the hay tray has been sat in, and there was a bat-hippo shape scurrying away when I went in to top up the hay and do the water bottles... please get well funny little hippo girl! There's just such a big hole in her neck... oozing all sorts of stuff... maybe @alpacasqueak 's Pedro and Tallulah should start a club for "feisty rodents with big surgical holes in but surviving"...
Better out than in! That's what I say! I think that's what she thinks too! :-)
 
Just caught up with this thread. Poor little Tallulah. I had a young piggy who had a huge haematoma post neutering which caused him a lot of pain. It took weeks for it to resolve. It's awful when they are babies. But on the plus side they just want to get on with living and growing. Here's hoping that the little hippo is finally on the road to recovery xx
 
Poor little girl, just one thing after another. She is very lucky to have you caring for her. What a feisty piggy she is. 💕
 
Poor little love. I’m such a fan of the bat-hippo, she sounds like an amazing, feisty, funny little thing I’m not surprised you’ve completely fallen for her.
 
Not good news from the vet... the lump is turning hard and they think a granuloma is forming, so her immune system has reacted badly to the suture material and is causing huge inflammation and forming a big lump of scar tissue full of white blood cells trying to attack the stitches. They cant take the stitches out, cant put any more in, so it's watch and wait and bathe the big hole with hibiscrub then let it dry and put manuka honey on later... vets every day until it settles or doesnt... ideally she needs more surgery but they'd have to take a lot of tissue out and if it happened again there'd be nothing left to sew back together...
Its a very rare complication, the vets havent seen it in a guinea pig before... bloody awkward hippo girl, please stop this daft granuloma business and heal up :(
 
Not good news from the vet... the lump is turning hard and they think a granuloma is forming, so her immune system has reacted badly to the suture material and is causing huge inflammation and forming a big lump of scar tissue full of white blood cells trying to attack the stitches. They cant take the stitches out, cant put any more in, so it's watch and wait and bathe the big hole with hibiscrub then let it dry and put manuka honey on later... vets every day until it settles or doesnt... ideally she needs more surgery but they'd have to take a lot of tissue out and if it happened again there'd be nothing left to sew back together...
Its a very rare complication, the vets havent seen it in a guinea pig before... bloody awkward hippo girl, please stop this daft granuloma business and heal up :(

Would a change of antibiotic help? We always use Zithromax for anything where abscesses have been involved. I haven't got any experience of this happening, so can't be any more help. What a nightmare! x
 
Would a change of antibiotic help? We always use Zithromax for anything where abscesses have been involved. I haven't got any experience of this happening, so can't be any more help. What a nightmare! x
There's no infection, it's like she's having a big allergic reaction to the stitches, her immune system has recognised the suture material as "foreign stuff that shouldnt be there" and is trying to get rid of it... she may get an infection if the wound stays open too long, but so far its clean, no abscess stuff left... just seroma fluid and now this weird inflamed scar tissue forming... I never thought as a pharmacologist I would be pinning my hopes on manuka honey but the vet said it should keep the wound edges clean and soothed and might promote healing... so manuka honey and more buprenorphine and loxicom and keep up the baytril to try keep any new infection away it is!
 
So sorry to read this. I haven’t heard of this kind of reaction to suture material before. Must be quite rare? She certainly is a complex little character.
 
Oh no, poor Tallulah. She's still eating though so I'm really hoping it looks worse than it feels - all my fingers are crossed for her.
 
Very rare, the vet has seen it in dogs and cats before but not a guinea pig... in dogs and cats they normally put a drain in the wound until the fluid stops accumulating then do a second surgery later to take the lump of scar tissue out... but she's just too small for any of that... so if she does heal up she might be a hunchback with a scar tissue lump... camel-bat-hippo-franken-pig... just gotta hope her immune system calms down and stops over reacting to the stitches!
 
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