Hello, I’m Pippin, and I’m a guinea pig. Today I’m going to discuss Daily Checks and Diagnosis, neither of which are much fun. Why arent we doing more fun things with our A2Z Challenge? Oh, they come later.

We’re helping out our Mummy, Jemima Pett, who is doing the A2Z this year by putting together all the posts we’ve done here on George’s Guinea Pig World, to make a book on Guinea Pig Care from A to Z. You can see her posts here: jemimapett.com/blog/. We’re filling in the gaps this month.

Daily (and Weekly) Checks

I must admit I never realised that Mummy did Daily Checks on us, but apparently she does. She says they are very easy to do when she gives us our cuddles.

She checks we look ‘normal’. That means we haven’t got a runny nose or eyes, we are breathing normally, not panting or struggling to breathe, and we haven’t got anything unusual around our cages. So, normal piles of poo, for example. She also sees whether we have eaten our food or not, and if we’ve left something, whether that’s just ‘normal’ or we might not have eaten if for a reason.

Once a weekly we have a formal check. We sit in the special place in the kitchen, have our noses looked at, we show her our front teeth and tongue, and she sees if she can move our lower jaw from side to side a little. Then she looks in our ears, which tickles, looks at our eyes from above to make sure they aren’t bulging, and then strokes us all the way down our bodies to make sure we havent got any lumps or bumps. Then the bit we don’t like, when she turns us so our backs are leaning against her, and she checks our bottoms, and our toes. The picture of Victor shows what she’s looking for – impaction, which is where we get balls of poo stuck. More about this later. And the whole process starts with her weighing us on her scales, and she writes notes in her books of our weights and other things, like toenails.

We have a different space than the boys before we moved, and different scales, too, but the procedure is the same.

Diagnosis

These checks and the notes Mummy keeps are important if there is something wrong and you need to go to the vet. Last month Mummy noticed something wrong with Ronnie, so she took him to the vet saying he’d lost weight. He’d gone from his normal 1050 gms to 975 in one week.

The vet checked other signs, like eating and pooing. Then the vet checked him from top to bottom, doing the same sort of checks, but she feels his tummy differently, because she knows how to tell what’s inside by feel. Then she listens to his insides with a thing called a stethoscope, which magnifies the noises inside. She listens through it to his tummy, to his lungs and breathing, and his heart.

A couple of the earlier pigs have had noisy hearts; George and Fred had a ‘heart murmur’ which apparently isn’t a problem (Mummy’s Mummy had one too), and Humphrey had a sloppy valve, which sort of slurped instead of clicking. He got meds for that.

Dr Rebekah checking Ronnie with the stethoscope.

If the doctor isn’t happy with what she’s found she may decide we need blood tests, and that usually means we have anaesthetic so that it doesnt hurt. I’ve never had blood tests. I think Locksley did because he had lots of interesting medicines for whatever they found out.

But it’s very useful for Mummy to take her notebook with us to the vet so she can check on her notes to help with the diagnosis. Or say what we’re doing differently from normal.

I’m sure there’s more to say about things beginning with D but either the other boys did it when they did the A to Z, or Mummy had plans under another letter. Like U for Undertaker. She says she’ll help me with that one. And we’ve got more to say about vets, too, under V.

So that’s it for today, come back tomorrow for the letter E!

love

Pippin xxx