Ear infection

[catalady]

I cleaned all my girls ears out yesterday and when I came to Tilly I found she had a couple of small lumps just in her outer ear and pus coming from either one of the lumps or near it. I decided to get her into the vets as it seemed quite painful when I cleaned it up and quite a lot of pus.
The vet, the first time I have been to this one, said that she has 2 polyps in her outer ear which he thinks are cutting off the air flow to her ear and so caused an infection. Whgen he looked inside her ear there was quite a lot of pus on the instrument . He has given me anti-biotic drops to put in both of her ears and said we need to keep an eye on these polyps as they may grow and then we may need to do soemthing about them.
I have done the drops twice now and and bathed the ear with warm salt water and , though it still seems quite painful when it is touched, there didn't seem to be any pus obvious today.It did reinforce to me though how important it is to check your piggies ears as in herself Tilly is absolutely fine, eating well, not tilting her head or showing any signs of it hurting or bothering her..so if I had not cleaned everyones ears yesterday I may not have found it until it was much worse and she was showing symptoms!
Obviously all I can do for now is continue with the drops and monitor the size of the growths but I just wondered if anyone else had ever experienced anything similar to this?
Tracy

[cozmo]

I haven't no. But good job on spotting it. I give my piggies a good check when I weigh them (which is once a week). I do worry about ear infections, though my Abyssinians are less likely to get them as their ears all stick up, its more likely that the ones with ears that fold over might get an ear infection as the air flow is limited. Same with dogs really. Ones with long hanging ears are prone to ear infections whereas dogs with sticky uppy easr aren't. However I'm not saying that ears that stick up won't get ear infections.

[Orlaith]

Aw, poor Tilly! Great job on catching it though! I hope she gets better soon. I've never seen anything like that on my piggies but I'll definitely keep an eye out.

[catalady]

Thankfully I haven't seen any pus in her ear for the past 48 hours so it seems that the antibiotic drops have cleared the infection up very quickly...now I just have to see if these polyps are going to cause it to recur - I hope not!

[delukem]

Oh well spotted. We have never had anything like that either, but we have had an ear infection caused by ear mites and this was found just by checking and cleaning ears as our guineapig hadn't shown any signs either. A course of antibiotic drops cleared this up over a few weeks though.