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teeth?

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poppipop

poppipop

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one of my piggies, butters, is not well. i noticed a couple of days ago that his fur on his head looked a bit puffy but thought he was lying down and was a bit fluffed up (he has a twirly bit on top of his head).

yesterday, he was inside the house when i went to see him and there was a foul urine smell. i got him out and his chin was soaked wet and his wee smelled. he didn't want to eat anything.

i listened to his chest and it seems fine, i gave him metacam and baytril (i have a sickly rescue chinchilla so we keep quite a pharmacy in case she gets sick when her vet is not available) and fed him some critical care - he wasn't too keen but managed to get some into him. i also gave him probiotics. once metacam kicked in, he started nibbling on hay but only took small chunks.

his top incisors look very slightly overgrown, there's about 1mm at the bottom that is thinner and there's like a 'step' either side - it sort of looks like as if the back of the teeth were wearing down but not the front (as if he had a bit of an overbite).

i would normally get him to the vet straight away but there isn't a specialist exotics surgery where i live, there however is an exotic vet at my normal surgery who's great but obviously is not on duty at all times and they wouldn't actually do any non emergency surgery anyway when the surgery is not open.

today, he seems better. he's more lively, he don't smell (i'm guessing it was dehydration?) he runs around. he's still not eating but his chin is dry which confuses me a little as it was completely soaked yesterday.

is there anything else i could be doing?
 
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i've been trying to feed him and he only takes a very small amount. he spits most of it out. it doesn't sit in his mouth, he sort of does a chewing motion and get it out of his mouth! i've tried normal critical care, fine grind critical care, i've mushed up pellets, tried different consistencies... why is he spitting it out?
 
It sounds like he has a problem with his teeth but be very wary of getting the front teeth done as if they are cut too short then that can also prevent them from eating properly. Have you tried to hand feed him some veggies to see if he has difficulty picking food up? The back teeth will also need to be checked, & the inside of his mouth in case he has a fungal mouth problem or sores from overgrown back teeth.
 
thank you, i have tried veggies, i even finely grated a carrot but he's having none of it. i do think that he's in pain because he started eating hay after his metacam last night. however, progress - i have managed to get food into him without him spitting out an awful lot by keeping a 1ml syringe in his mouth while he swallows. it seems to work.

once i can actually see my vet, i'm confident she will do a thorough check - she's done a fantastic job with my chinchilla who has problems with her molars and saved my rescue chin's life on numerous occasions (she was a very sick chinchilla when i got her) so i trust her implicitly and don't feel comfortable seeing anybody else if the little furies need attention.
i had to take one of my guinea pigs to the emergency vet on a sunday night once as he would not move much or swallow food and the vet couldn't see anything wrong apart from maybe teeth slightly overgrown so booked him in for trimming and worming for the next day. i brought him and his friend so he wouldn't be alone but when i picked him up they said his teeth were actually not bad at all. they couldn't see anything wrong with him either. he was an old piggy and he had to be euthanised the next day so they suspect perhaps he had an internal problem. i just feel that he should not have been put through spending a day in an unfamiliar environment with all the noises etc - that's why i want to make sure i see the vet i trust with piggies.
 
things seem to be improving! he's taking food quite happily and his fur/body condition has improved! he's taking food quite happily and he's interested in hay.

is it possible the above symptoms were caused by dehydration? his front teeth are nowhere near bad enough to cause this but i thought perhaps the molars were worse.

then my husband pointed out that the water in the bottle has not been going down as much as it normally does (he's the water person). we put butters and pumpkin together a week ago - there was a proper introduction and they get on well, there were no problems to start with - but they had different style bottles when they were separate - pumpkin had the bottle with ball and butters had the sippy bottle you need to push up to drink. when we put them together, he put pumpkin's bottle in. maybe butters couldn't work out how to use it? we've added his bottle yesterday when he thought that may have been the problem.

i'm obviously still going to take him to the vet when they open but fingers crossed that's what it was!
 
just in case somebody does a search and gets to this post.

butternut squash was taken to the vet but she couldn't find anything specifically wrong with him, the only thing indicating illness was low body temperature and his behaviour. she did prepare us for the worst and suggested swapping baytril for septrin and added protexin to help his tummy a little.
this was on a wednesday. he still kept losing weight. on friday, we gave him a bath which he very much enjoyed and he fell asleep wrapped in a towel on my chest.
at the weekend, he started putting weight on. slowly we started withdrawing hand feeds and now, three weeks on, he's 100g up and back to being himself.

i have no idea what was wrong with him but it was presumably some sort of internal infection. he went from being a very nearly dead piggy to a well one. i am so so relieved and just would like to encourage anybody who thinks their piggy may be beyond repair - this is true of many cases but sometimes making them eat and giving them support for long enough will get them through it.

i am also grateful for having a vet who is very much animal welfare based rather than procedure based. she couldn't see anything wrong with his teeth, he was too ill for a surgery should he need one and there's only a limited amount of drugs they can give to guinea pigs so we had limited options - thus we decided against additional testing and in this case, i think had he been put through that, it would have tipped him over the edge and butters would no longer be around (and we probably wouldn't be any wiser).
that is, of course, not to say that one shouldn't test when tests are necessary. but even if we x-rayed butters, and got a tumour back, there was nothing we could have done about it and there was every chance he wouldn't make it through the X-rays.

he's a happy boy now :)
 
This is great news :) at last a happy outcome, so much on here is sad these days. I am very happy for you both :)
 
thank you :) oddly i think the bath helped! i was very dubious about giving him one because i thought he really had other problems but because he sat in his wee and the wee smelled bad because of dehydration, i thought it must have felt awful.

as soon as i put him in the water he was splashing around and moving more than when on dry land! maybe he's actually an otter :)
and he was so snug in the towel afterwards, he had his eyes shut and all!
 
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