The Choking Incident
It was a nice, lackadaisical Saturday morning, us lounging while Tangent and Meander enjoyed their morning veggies in their floor playpen. Suddenly, the sound of a cough from Tangent. It’s just a cough, right? No big deal. Then another. Hmmm. I start googling what to do for a coughing guinea pig. And then my heart sinks as I hear what is unmistakably an urgent choking sound, and panic sets in… the googling changes to “Help, my guinea pig is choking!”, but I don’t immediately find an answer for what to do. I pick him up and rub his throat a bit - no change. I try to look in his mouth, and he wasn’t having any of that. At this point, both of us humans are involved, one of us calling the vet (but they’re closed on Saturdays), while the other tries random things from the internet (holding them upside down while moving them up and down, rubbing his abdomen). Nope, still choking. His eyes are turning glossy. As a last resort, we text the wonderful person who runs the shelter we adopted the boys from, and she immediately replied with things to try. In the end, we were able to resolve the issue without a vet visit, but I’m so darn glad we adopted the boys from a shelter and had that resource available when things went sideways. Here’s what we tried and how it all played out over the course of about 15 minutes:
we syringed some water into his mouth which he gladly accepted (a syringe with no needle, a part of our emergency kit our shelter recommended). This seemed to change the horrific choking noises into a loud gurgly wheezing noise.
we waited a minute or two to see if it would resolve - when it didn’t, we used a wet q-tip (another emergency kit essential) to gently sweep inside his mouth. Tangent HATED this, and I did the best I could to be as gentle as possible. The q-tip came out green colored with specks on it, but no big particles.
we waited another few minutes and the gurgling changed to this little snorting noise
We started researching an emergency vet the rescue told us about, and while doing that, Tangent stopped making that noise. His eyes were still really watery and he looked pretty out of it, so we monitored him for a few minutes. After about five minutes, his eyes looked better and he seemed a lot perkier. We decided to monitor him for a bit and returned him to his enclosure. After a minute or two he was rumblestrutting as usual and then ran over to eat hay.
We are still monitoring him, and the rescue suggested we observe for any signs of respiratory troubles in the next week, so that’s the current plan.
Meanwhile, I have created a label of the emergency vet info to stick on our emergency kit so if this happens again, we don’t have to figure it out while feeling startled.
From now on, I’m not going to be cutting their veggies up for them into such small pieces. I’ve been cutting up smallish pieces and sprinkling them around so the boys can forage for their veggies, and the shelter suggested it might be helpful to put down bigger chunks of veggies so they can bite off and chew appropriate sized bites (plus it makes them work a little more for it, never a bad thing). We’ll make that change right away, and hopefully this will prevent any future issues. Lesson learned!
