Lily’s appointment is on Wednesday in Virginia. She’s my 4(ish) year old guinea pig that gave birth to a bunch of pups a few years ago. She’s never been to the doctor since she moved in with me, and I found out this weekend that she’d chewed the hair off her lower side.
This is a suspicious location because with previous guinea pigs that have had issues with cysts, it’s right there. Whether it was with ovarian cysts or the cyst on Chai’s kidney – same location.
She’s at that age where this may be what we’re looking at, but if this is currently the case, it doesn’t seem to be causing too much pain as she’s still a hefty 1030 grams. I noticed maybe two months ago that she’s having a little harder time hopping into the box where they hang out and eat hay, and this could all be old age, or just correlation.
I’ve been checking out options online, and if we’re looking at cysts it would really be up to the facility on how they want to treat it. You could do injections of Lupron to reduce and prevent cysts, you could simply remove the ovaries over the flanks, or you go in through the abdomen and have to move the digestive tract around and get the problematic reproductive system out.
I have done the last two with guinea pigs Mu-Xi and Chai. We didn’t try the Lupron injections on Coco because it was a newer treatment that didn’t seem definitive and they were $90 per shot, years ago.

We will see. I could be totally off and that is what trained professionals and modern medicine is for. Lily is bright and plucky. She was on one side of the pen today eating hay with her daughter, Murphy. I walked over for a split second and walked away, and then watched her from the kitchen door. She looked over towards her dish, put her nose in the air, toddled over, found a slice of tomato, and carried it onto her cushion to go lay down and nom the tomato.

Her daughter didn’t notice a thing.