[hedgewitch]

Hey all!

When I checked on my lil lady, Eudora, this morning there was blood on the paper towel/tray where she poops/pees. I woke her up to check for any injuries (especially for broken nails!) but didn't see anything obvious, so I'm thinking it's a uti or maybe an issue with her uterus.

I have a wyze cam on her cage, so I was able to look back at her night, and everything seemed normal (eating, drinking, running on her wheel etc).

I'm planning to give her a bath tonight so I can check her feet/body again, and I'm planning to replace her fleece liner with a lighter colored one so I can more easily spot any additional issues.

I made an appointment with the vet for tomorrow afternoon, and I'll plan to update the thread with any insights, but feel free to chime in!

 

[hedgewitch]

An update I couldn't have imagined - when we went to the vet they discovered she has cancer and it's already metastasized, so they won't be able to treat her. She's there for the night, and I'll pick her up in the morning.

As I said above, she's still been eating/running on her wheel, etc, as usual, so it seems like she's still comfortable. I'm just devastated to know she won't be with me much longer.

 

[hedgewitch]

Hi all -

I know this is a late update, but I'm so grateful for the folks who responded and sent well wishes. In a surprising turn of events - Eudora is still alive and well - for months I've been anticipating a downturn, but it just hasn't happened. Right now Eudora and I are at my partner's house in Missouri, and so I had to get her by seen a new vet here to re-up her palliative care medication (basically an aleeve a day!).

This vet saw her and the medical records and immediately said - this does not look like a hedgehog that has had metastasized cancer since October... so we had the xrays sent, since they didn't include those in the first round of medical records. The Missouri vet examined them, and even consulted another colleague of hers at a different practice, and they agreed that while the xrays weren't normal, they did not look like the diagnosis I'd gotten before. They also noted that the angle of the x-rays/Eudora made it challenging to know for sure.

So i just dropped her off to get an additional round of x-rays. She'll have to be sedated, which i always get a little nervous about, but as I said to my partner, we'd already been told she was going to die in November 2019, and nothing we find out today can be worse than that, since we've already had so much more time with her than we thought we'd get.

Her 2nd birthday is this weekend! <3

Sunny

 

[hedgewitch]

In case this thread comes up for folks with blood in urine / similar issues, I'll plan to keep it up to date.

The vet confirmed she does not have metastasized cancer, but she does have something - maybe hyperplasia, maybe a tumor. Because of the blood flow around the mass and her anemia, we're concerned about the risk of any potential surgery and are planning to continue palliative care (meloxicam daily) and monitor the quality of life - just like we were with the previous cancer diagnosis.

It's always really hard to make these kinds of decisions, but we feel like this is the right path for her. And we're just so grateful to have more time than we thought we would with sweet Eudora.