October 30th

Cosmos, the cuy (meat guinea pig), has been at UC Davis for the weekend.  He had his foot injured in an accident at his regular vet, and has been fighting an infection since then.  Vic asked me to talk to the doctor from UC Davis, as she wanted my opinion.  He has an antibiotic resistant infection in the only foot he doesn't have bad arthritis in, and they've been giving him injections of antibiotics twice a day.  He's obese, because he's a food breed, and is designed to get fat, quickly, so the possibility of amputating his foot is a problem because he'll just stop moving entirely.  They were talking about debriding the infection out of his foot, and at the same time taking a culture so they can figure out if whatever's eating one of the bones in there is the infection or cancer.  At this point, we decided to call it a day, as this would be a risky proposition in a young regular guinea pig - in a 4.5 year old cuy, it's very unlikely that he'll survive the surgery and the post-treatment (regular bandage changes and antibiotic injections - possibly for months).  We figure he had about a year of life left (we were originally told cuys lived 3 years, but as time goes by, more and more are getting better health care, so the estimate now is 5-6 years), and it seemed wrong for his to be miserable for a quarter of it, assuming everything went well.  We've donated the body so they can figure out what happened here.