Tag: thomas

A couple of weeks ago I noticed that Thomas has a prolapsed penis (his penis was sticking out of his cone), usually when degus, um, “groom” their penis it goes back in the cone and isn’t visible. Thomas went for a trip to the vet that morning to get the penis back in and I learned how to do it in case there was a next time. Everything was fine for a few hours. Then his penis kept coming back out and I kept helping him to put it away again.

The next day Thomas went back to the vet for some further investigations as to what might be causing the problem – it was suspected that there could be kidney stones which would have required an operation. There was no obvious cause for the prolapsed penis, although they did find signs of the early stages of arthritis on his spine, Thomas had a UTI and was given some medicine to take for a week. His penis kept coming out again and the vet decided that the medicine should be stopped due to the amount of stress it was causing Thomas (he wouldn’t take the medication on oat flakes the way the little guys do and he doesn’t like to be held) and any help from the medicine was likely being cancelled out by the stress. When Thomas wasn’t getting better the medicine was tried again, this time on popcorn, he ate this well and I haven’t seen his penis in days. Hopefully that’s the end of it for now.

Popcorn is safe for degus if it has been air popped and is plain. It makes a good occasional treat and it turns out it is very absorbent and useful for liquid medication.