Despite the betrayal of been given a bath earlier! Worth not being able to move for ages ❤️

Here's a picture of her mid-anointing after she got some tomato as a treat 🥹

My vet suggested doing a preventative spay on my new hog (Gnocchi). She’s 6 months and has a very clean bill of health. I’ve seen a lot of mixed reviews on this since you can’t really do anything to stop hedgehogs from licking or biting the incision site. My vet is wonderful, and I want to do what is medically recommended. I did express my hesitation for the risk versus benefit, and they were very understanding. I declined at that visit, but did say I would consider it in the future. I’m leaning towards not doing it. However, I would be kicking myself if she were to develop a cancer that could have been prevented if I did decide to do the spay. Has anyone done a spay like this on here before? If so, how was the recovery?

I had to say goodbye to our hedgehog after he got fast growing cancer last month. I have all of his materials: cage, liner, unopened food, blankets, wheels, hide huts, heat lamp, thermometer. Does anyone in the Dallas area need materials or know of a rescue/volunteer that does? I’d be happy to set them out for free or have you pick them up at my husbands office in Dallas.

My hedgehog (pebble) is a very active 13 weeks old hedgehog, he's pretty friendly and I obviously want to take a picture of him, but his energy outmatch mine and i can't even take a proper picture of him.

Do you guys have a trick to get a cute picture?

Long story short, around a month ago Poppy (who is nearly 7 and a half) started chewing a little strange and making a weird noise with her mouth that sounded like chewing kind of, but while her mouth was empty. After paying closer attention for a few days, I noticed there was a little bit of swelling starting on the upper part of her mouth/snout and I immediately suspected a tumor since that seems to be so common. I then took a video while she was drinking that gave a good view into her mouth, and I noticed a whiteish color mass behind her upper back tooth. This made me think it was possibly an abscess since she is getting old but that would actually be fixable, and I had a vet appointment scheduled at the next opening. The swelling got a bit worse before the vet, but it was nothing really that alarming. It was kind of hard to see into her mouth without sedating her and I didnt really want to do that just to look since she was so old, and from the videos he also agreed that it seemed likely to be an abscess from dental disease. So, we ended up scheduling a surgery to remove some teeth and drain the abscess and stuff since for that I figured the slight risks of sedating her would be worth it. However, after the surgery, it sadly did end up actually being a tumor so there wasn't really much that could be done that she would be able to handle. He removed a few of the nearby teeth and did what he could from the tumor, but other than that medicine doing whatever it can is the only real option left.

That was Friday morning. After the surgery, the swelling went down and she started looking normal from the outside, but you could still tell chewing was an issue. She was eating and drinking and walking around normally, which I was kind of surprised about, and even walked in her wheel for 10-15 seconds. However, last night (two and a half days after the surgery) the outside of her mouth/snout wasnt swelling at all like it was before, but her eye was bulging like 1/3 of the way out of her head and was surrounded by a red color, I guess either some trapped blood or her eyesocket. However surprisingly she could still close it, was still eating and drinking and acting mostly normal, and seemed to go to sleep and was doing good. This morning she woke up around her normal time, ate and drank like normal, but her eye was a little bit more bulging than last night I believe, closer to 40% maybe even 50% when she was chewing. I called the vet again just to double check and make sure there was nothing else we could do for this problem even though we couldnt do anything about the tumor, but sadly he said there wasnt really much to do about this either other than continuing the medicine and hope it helps with the swelling as much as it possibly can.

I don't want to put her down too early and question if she still had time left to enjoy in her life, but I also dont want to wait until her pain gets a lot worse or something even crazier than just her eye popping out or something happens and sit there feeling guilty for not doing it earlier. I was mostly just kind of wondering if anyone had been through anything similar and was able to talk about how quickly/slowly things happened to help me with the decision on when its eventually time. I know they hide their pain, but if shes still walking around and eating and drinking a good amount and on her own then I feel like it can't be time yet - and I obviously dont want to do it too soon. But her eye also seemed to go from perfectly normal to sticking 1/3 out of her head in like two hours, so I dont know if that means its just going to keep going super fast.