[Gpdd] [Rainbow Bridge] Dilly Jr.

[scalabro3 at cfl.rr.com]

Greetings, friends. It is with great shock and sadness that I am writing this post. Our dear Dilly Jr. left us for the Rainbow Bridge on January 2nd. My plan for that day was to get up, exercise, have a nice lunch with my husband and then write a post to the GPDD. I was gong to share with you all of the drama of the past year and end with the fact that, remarkably, we were all still here. Unfortunately, life didn’t work out that way.

On January 1st, I was finishing up Donovan’s medications and physical therapy at about 10 pm. He had a bladder stone removed in November. I was reluctant to subject him to surgery due to his advanced age, but the vet convinced me that it would be OK. It was at first, but then, on day 2 post op, he had a stroke. He’s had limited use of his back legs and one of his front legs since then. All things considered, he’s doing well. 

When I put Donovan back in his pen, I noticed that the celery that my husband had given Dilly earlier that evening hadn’t been touched. I picked up Dilly, and he had the look of a pig who had given up on life. Earlier that day, he was fine, but that evening, something seemed to be terribly wrong with him. I tried to get him to eat lettuce and his favorite carrot, and he refused. I whipped up a batch of critical care and force fed him every two hours through the night. As soon as the vet opened, I brought him in. I didn’t want to leave him there by himself, but they said that was the only way his vet could see him.  

At 1:30 pm, they called and said that he was OK and that he just had a minor digestive problem. They prescribed metaclopramide, metronidazole and metacam. We discussed doing x-rays, but the vet felt that it wasn’t really needed because she was confident that there was no blockage. She kept him for observation until 4:00 pm, but when I picked him up, he was so weak.  He only lived another hour. 

We met with the vet again that evening. We were both in shock. She said that she had examined him twice that day and that he was running around and seemed to have a lot of energy. I guess that he put on quite a show for them. That must be why he was so exhausted when he cam home.  She wanted to do a necropsy to see what went wrong. Normally, I wouldn’t consider it, but due to the sudden nature of  his illness and death, I agreed. I’m glad that I did.  Dilly had a 2 inch section of his small intestine that had a torsion. She said that she had to rotate it two and a half times to undo it. The loop of intestine was completely necrotic. She said that it wouldn’t have shown up on x-ray and that she would have only found it if she had opened him up. If she had found it, the only thing that she could have done would have been to euthanize him.  

While I’m so very sad that this happened to our dear little Dilly, my husband and I are relieved that it wasn’t something that we did. We were also glad to find that it wasn’t another bladder stone. We’ve had two more stone pigs since Reese died last January in spite of changing their food and giving them bottled water for the past year.

We will miss our sweet little Dilly so much. We didn’t plan on adopting him. I went to pick up hay at a local pet store one day about four years ago and saw his sweet little face looking up at me. I picked him up and sat on the floor of the pet store and called my husband and told him that he needed to come and get me if he didn’t want me to bring home another pig. When he got to the store and saw us, he didn’t say anything, he just pulled out his wallet and asked the owner of the store if she had a box to put him in so we could take him home. 

Dilly had a really bad fungal infection, and he ended up losing a lot of the hair on his back side, but once it grew back it was shiny and beautiful. He was a lemon agouti like Dillon, one of our first pair of guinea pigs.  He also had little bits of white in his fur and little white finger tips, so his little nails were easy to trim.  He loved to be petted. He especially liked to have his fur rubbed the wrong way. He loved to be brushed and groomed. He would just stretch out and purr when we groomed him. He also would stand up at the front of his pen whenever one of us would enter his room so we could pick him up easily.  He was just such a special little guy. 

Originally, we paired him with Chakalaka, but Dilly was a barber. It seemed like that could be a good thing because Chakalaka is a sheltie who can grow a foot of hair if we don’t keep it trimmed. Unfortunately, Chakalaka didn’t appreciate Dilly’s attention, and they would fight. So, they had to live next door to each other. 

Godiva has moved into Dilly’s pen now, and her pen has been disassembled. That was the last of the temporary pens. So now we are a family of five pigs with four pens.  

Dilly was our one healthy pig in the herd. Donovan had stones and is now dealing with paralysis; Cocoa Puff has a permanent head tilt, runny eye and asthma; Chakalaka had stone surgery earlier this year; Godiva has some sort of mysterious swelling in her intestines; and Ghirardelli has a dermal cyst on the lining of her brain that has eroded two holes in her skull.  We’ve spent so much time worrying about the rest of the herd this year, who would have guessed that our dear little Dilly would be the next to leave us. He was such a sweet little soul. We wish he could have stayed longer.

ME in New Smyrna Beach with Donovan, Cocoa Puff, Chakalaka, Godiva and Ghirardelli in our home and with Dillon, Twinkie, Puffy, Reese and Dilly Jr. Forever in our Hearts