There's a guinea pig in hospital that's been a regular visitor. Apparently her owner loves her too much, and continues to feed her a mountain of fruit and vegetables despite repeated emphasis on the fact that guinea pigs require a large amount of roughage in their diet, a fact supported by the multiple nearly $1000 hospital bills. So once again, the guinea pig has been hospitalised, diagnosed, and put on meds. The upside to this is there's a guinea pig in hospital.
My reaction went something like this: Walks through ICU doors. "...going for ultrasound later todaaaaoooooohhh guinea pig!"
My excitement resulted in the intern handing me the guinea pig to hold for a while, which I was quite happy to do. She's a brown, smooth-coated piggie with an adorable Spanish name. The intern immediately walked away to do something, and other people entered the ICU and had a similar reaction to myself (including a clinician). Unfortunately, since I was holding the guinea pig, I started getting asked questions about the history and treatments. Of course, I had no clue, so I quickly found the intern and gave the guinea pig back.
That night I was on evening treatments, so I made a beeline to the ICU so I could be the one to do the guinea pig. It involved basically the same thing as any other animal, but tiny version. The heart rate was a bazillion beats per minute and their little bums are teeny tiny for trying to take a temperature. The other thing I had to do, since she was admitted for gastrointestinal hypomotility (I think), was count all the poops to make sure she was producing an adequate number per hour. So I stood there gathering all the guinea pig poops out of the cage and then counting them one by one. There were fifty, in case you were wondering.
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