What with worrying about Loey’s neck, and him deciding that he’d like to feed every one and a half hours overnight, it’s been a pretty stressful couple of days. As if worrying about small son through extreme tiredness wasn’t hard enough, the other morning one of our girls got sick. I let them out as usual - I thought it was a bit strange that only three came out, but just assumed that the fourth must have been laying. About an hour later I happened to look out the laundry window, to see an alarming bundle of black feathers plonked in the middle of their run. I raced out, thinking we had a dead chook for sure, but as I approached she lurched to her feet, staggered a few steps, and then collapsed again.
Great. Sick chook.
I put her in a box and called the fellow that we bought them from. After laughing at me a bit because he was sure that we’d been giving them names and overfeeding them, he said he thought it was probably a stuck egg (because of the overfeeding), but if it wasn’t it was something horrible and deadly. I stuck my well gloved finger up her bum but couldn’t feel anything egg-like.
Great. Really sick chook.
So I rang the animal hospital, who luckily had an appointment with their bird vet available that very morning. They would only make an appointment if I provided a name for the chicken, which made me laugh after being teased only a few minutes earlier for naming them. They don’t have names, because I can’t tell them apart, so we said just call her Chook. We then pissed ourselves when at the hospital they called out ‘Chook Pink to room 6, Chook Pink to room 6.’
The bird vet turned out to be a total spunk, and lovely to boot. We had assumed that either she’d be able to get the stuck egg out, or Chook would get the chop (’be euthanased’ in the delicate phrase of the vet). But it turns out that it’s very difficult to diagnose a chicken without cutting it open, and it wasn’t clear what was wrong - it could still have been a stuck egg, only stuck pretty early in the process which is why I couldn’t feel it; or it could have been something deadly. (And she was pretty overweight, so all our girls are now on a strict diet.) So, for the cost of two replacement chickens, Chook got to spend the night in the hospital being tube fed fluids and generally cared for much more carefully than we ever do. The next day spunky chicken vet called and said that Chook was walking again and feeling much better, so it probably was a stuck egg after all, and we could come and pick her up that day.
So Chook is now segregated from the others so that we can monitor her output - she is basically in solitary until she proves that she is working again by pooing regularly and laying an egg. She’s definitely brighter than she was, making loads of noise and poo and generally trying to tell us something, though whether it’s that she’s happy to be home or pissed off about being in solitary I can’t tell.
Loey update for those who made it this far: we took him to the osteopath on Monday night. It was a bit anti-climactic - we’d been expecting to be given a series of exercises or something, stuff that we can DO about it, but she just said we’re actually doing the right things already (lots of tummy and back time, encouraging him to look in different directions), and that she wanted about 3-4 weeks to work on releasing the nerve that controls the muscle that is shortened, before we attempted manually stretching the muscle itself. So we’ve given her 4 weeks to prove that her way will make a difference, and then we’re going for the more conventional care of a physiotherapist, who will treat with physical therapy and stretching. We felt hopeful that after Monday he did seem a bit less tense in the neck, maybe a smidgen straighter, but it’s so hard to tell - we’ll take a photo a week to monitor any changes. It’s frustrating to realise that this is going to be a really slow process…
