[Gpdd] HEALTH: Isis needs to gain some weight!

[Angela Taylor]

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Hello all!

As many of you know, we've been battling Isis's ovarian cysts for a few
years now, and she'll be 5 in December. They caused her digestive distress,
and she was up and down there for a few months. We got her to a decent
place, and she was there for quite a while, having occasional pain and bouts
of soft poop that we were managing with meloxicam and diet.

Her problem now is that her poops are always soft, plentiful, and VERY
smelly, and she's lost a quite a bit of weight in the last few months (from
2lbs 2oz to 1lb 9oz -- yeah, not good). She still eats like a horse, and is
always begging for more food, more food, more food, which she eats like
there's no tomorrow. She drinks probably 3 times the water that our other
girls do...we refill her water bottle every two or three days. She still
begs for scritches and loves getting them, but she's not comfortable being
out of her cage for longer than a few minutes. I think it's because she's
pooping so much and wants to do it "at home." (Doesn't everyone feel that
way when their stomach is upset?) I have to clean her cage twice, sometimes
three times a week.

After thinking about it, I had a theory: Maybe she stopped eating her cecal
poops because of her digestive distress, which made it worse...she didn't
have the bacteria necessary to digest her food properly. We've been
sprinkling her nightly lettuce with Acidophilus for a week or two now, and I
have noticed that her poop is a little less smelly, but there's still lots
of it and it's still soft. I haven't seen an increase in her weight like I
hoped since we started the Acidophilus.

Does anyone have any thoughts or recommendations about what we can do to
make her tummy happy and get some meat on this poor girl's bones?

~*~
Angela, Peter, and the Guinea Goddesses
Isis, Artemis (Mimi), and Pomona (Mona)

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