[Gpdd] HEALTH: Doris -- Obviously It Wasn't the Rimadyl !!!

[pat schuett]

Well, whatever caused little Doris to stop moving around a couple of weeks ago, it wasn't the Rimadyl (which I had started giving to her three days before this strange new behavior began), because she started doing the same thing again yesterday and I stopped the Rimadyl right after the first occurrence.  
Honestly, I didn't know what to think at that time, because I knew many experienced piggie people and vets/rodentologists had used Rimadyl with excellent results, but the timing did make me nervous, and when she started to improve almost immediately after I stopped giving the Rimadyl, I naively assumed I had found the cause.
Now I don't know what to think.  If I had a truly experienced piggie vet, a trip there would be the obvious next step, but my vet is not very experienced, and has done best by my piggies when I had a fairly definite set of symptoms or conditions I wanted her to test for.  I'm not sure what she would be able to determine from what's happening now, and I would not take Doris in today anyhow; the clinic is walk-in --- no appointments --- and going in on Saturday usually means being crammed in for hours in a small waiting room alongside large barking dogs and loudly unhappy cats.
After today, the vet is gone again until Wednesday.

What *seemed* to help last time was giving her extra calcium and Vitamin C, but since Doris has had ongoing problems with urinary infections and crystals, I was not sure what the effect would be of giving her the extra calcium on an ongoing basis, so after five or six days, I stopped it.  Has anyone else had a similar situation, of needing or wanting to supplement calcium with a piggie who seemed likely to develop stones with excess calcium?  Maybe the calcium supplement is a different type of calcium than what forms stones?   

Now we seem to be back where we started --- she is sitting almost continously in one of her litterboxes, and will eat almost everything I bring to her and put right in front of her.  She would not move the ten inches or so to the front of the cage to eat her veggie plate this morning, but when I brought it to her, she polished off every bite.  The litterbox is full of hay, which I see her munching on regularly and when I changed the litterbox this morning, there was a good pile of poos and a reasonable amount of pee.  In some ways, this seems like it could be normal behavior for an elderly piggie (Doris is 6+), it's just not normal for Doris, or at least it wasn't until the last few weeks!  

                                           Worried Slave Pat S.