- Nov 16, 2015
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I had a suspected mycoplasma respiratory infection in a large group of young ducklings recently. The vet autopsied one and said she felt it ipwas mycoplasma due to the autopsy findings and I had 5e option to pay another 230 or so to get a definitive test before getting the tylosin, or get the tylosin antibiotics ($530) and treat, so I opted for the latter
Anyway I had 4 ducklings with sever respiratory symptoms which I separated from the rest of the flock. Two died, and the other two survived but one started to get a swollen sinus. I left it for a while as I have a few ducklings in the past get swollen sinuses and they have resolved with no treatment or with nasal/nare flush with a syringe of saline and a touch of colloidal silver.
However this ducklings sinus got bigger and bigger and finally I decided to take it to the vet but my bird vet wasn’t working today, and the clinic is about 40-50km from where I live, I was gong out there today anyway so had hoped I could get the duckling seen at the same time.
As I am pretty busy at the moment, rather than have to drive out there tomorrow or next week I decided to do a video search on sinus draining and found a video of a chap draining huge chunks of nasty cheesy pus out of various chickens eyes. Strangely this motivated me and I decided it was time to bite the bullet and deal with the ducklings sinus.
So for anyone’s reference who might want to try this (at your (or rather your duck’s) risk!) here is what I did.
I only did it a few hours ago and am posting this mostly because I am still in sheer awe of the amount of yellow very smelly cheesy stuff that came out of one sinus! Obviously it is too soon yet to tell if there will be complications such as infection. Even if there is a wound infection I still think that it probably isn’t as bad as what it was!
So for pain relief, I got alocal anaesthetic cream that can be purchased here over the counter called Emla. It’s a combination of two local anaesthetics lidocaine 25mg/g and prilocaine 25mg/g
The trick with the local anaesthetic creams seems to be that they need to stay on the skin for at least an hr with plastic over the top. So how to achieve that in a duck?
What I did was get some double sided tape that is quite strongly sticky, stuck two layers together leaving the backing layer on each side, and cut out a small square shape, with a square hole in the centre the size of the area I needed to cover.
I then peeled off the backing on one side and stuck the square to a piece of clean clear plastic I cut to size from an (unused) sealable sandwich bag
I then put the Emla on the plastic in the centre of the square on the plastic on the other side, andafter wiping the area clean on the duckling and drying it with tissue, I stuck it on and hoped for the best.
An hour and a half later it was still stuck on so off we went.
Following advice I had found somewhere I made an incision along the bottom part of the swollen area.
This was wrong. I only found bloody tissue, blood and a slight bit of clear fluid there.
It also looked like there were a lot of blood vessels around the swollen area, and I was starting to think maybe the poor duckling had a carcinoma or something equally cancerous.
However at the same time I began to smell a nasty smell.. anyone who has done a real ripper of a bumblefoot will know the smell I mean! Which gave me hope (hope in that a smelly infection is better than a carcinoma!)
I think the clear fluid was emitting that smell. However at the same time I noticed that the clear fluid discharge from the ducklings nare on the swollen side, has some small cheesy chunks in it. Possibly my poking and prodding in the sinus had pushed some of the cheesy crap out the nare.
Anyway that prompted me to look closer at the overall nare area and I noticed there was some swelling where the beak ends and the feathers/skin start, that was not present on the opposite side. Aha! Here is my pus! So I started to cut it open. I had to go thru several layers of tissue, first the skin, then some sort of fibrous tissue then I was trying to make a small cut in what I assume was the sinus, when the duckling who I thyou ugh I had well restrained moved her head, and the cut was a little bigger than I had planned (I had wanted to make a tiny cut to see if I could see the caseous exudate I was expecting, before cutting her open further to get it out). Anyway the ducklings head movement actually resulted in the cut being the right size and I could see a large yellow, stinky cheesy lump in there. I gently started to squeeze mostly on the beak side, so between the beak and just under the eye and out came this huge cheesy lump, about 1.5 - 2cm long...
And another
And another
And half a dozen later out came what I thought was the core, so I’m thinking, thank god, we are done...but squeezed to check and out came another enormous 2cm lump
And another
And another
Seriously it was like ground hog day, except instead of rerunning the same day I kept rerunning the same huge lumps of nasty as yellow cheesy pus. I still can’t fathom how that much sheer volume of pus actually fit in there!
At the same time, lumps were coming out her nare. So I grabbed my last syringe of sterile saline and flushed it with that, had to apply a bit of force to evacuate another long thick chunk of yellow crap...
And still more is coming out of the nare....
By now, if this were cottage cheese, you would seriously have enough to generously spread (1/2 to 1cm, or around 1/3 an inch thick ) over a large slice of bread, edge to edge! Not exaggerating!
Another large chunk started sticking out of the nare and I was out of saline. I didn’t want to leave it to decided to risk some boiled water which I had to mix with tap water to get it cool enough to use straight away, plus salt to make it saline, and some oxytetracycline, and flushed the next lot of chunky cheese out of the nare with that by flushing thru the opposite nare. I kept flushing till no more came out and also pressed the sinus and get all the rest I could out of there.
I would have liked to flush the sinus itself but didn’t want to stick a needle full of non sterile fluid into the sinus directly and figured it would be better to just fill it with antibiotic and flush later if it needed, after getting some more sterile saline. So I pushed some chloramphenicol ointment into the sinus and glued it 2/3 of the way closed (though it was sitting closed and not pulling open anyway. I left the bottom part open so it could drain and incase I needed to get more crap out. I will probably glue that area in the next few days unless it closes by itself.
The duckling tolerated the whole procedure really well and only a couple of small yelps to indicate pain. She didn’t appear to feel any pain at all for most of the cutting, and from personal experience using Emla to numb an infection I lanced in my own finger, I can say it does definitely completely numb the skin if you leave it under plastic for an hr or more.
I also gave the duckling some meloxicam for pain relief once the Emla wore off, and for swelling, and she is already on tylosin so will continue on that,
Half an hr later it had swollen up a little and I was hoping that was just due to the trauma from me cutting it, and a few hrs after that the swelling had reduced. I will be watching her carefully for any signs of infection over the next few days and if I were going to attempt this again I would definitely make sure I had a lot more sterile saline and sterile syringes on hand, I had one sterile syringe, which I used to flush her nares out, but once I got into it I wished I had at least one more sterile syringe to flush the nare itself outplus more saline, I would also have used sterile needles to be able to flush the nare out as the syringe by itself is too big to be pushing around in there.
I will try and remember to post updates on her recovery and any complications.
I also would definitely not attempt this without antibiotics oral and topical. And for me, I already knew the duckling had recovered from likely mycoplasma and the swelling was most likely a large lump of cheesy pus that was caused by an infection that she has now recovered from, just the body can’t get rid of that pus. I’d also seen the photos of the sinus of the duckling who was sacrificed (would have died anyway) and had seen huge lumps of yellow cheesy stuff in the sinus and the vet had said that antibiotics cannot rid them of this cheesy stuff once it forms, so even th ughnthe active infection appears to be well over, the cheesy stuff needed to be physically removed.
She did appear to be getting rid of some via her nares, but seeing how much was in there, I doubt she could have ever gotten it all out that way (she’d had died of old age first!)
So if a duck had swelling from an unknown cause, it might be differnt
This wee girl was in good spirits and normal energy and appetite aside from the swollen sinus. When she was sick with the respiratory infection her and the other survivor were lethargic and not eating or drinking much. And both are stunted and behind where they should be size wise, but are very energetic, eating like horses, and so on. So I don’t know if that will make a difference recovery wise, but I am fairly confident the bug behind the original infection is no longer active and therefore hopefully there is less risk of infection in the area, and the chloramphenicol plus continuing the tylosin will keep her from getting any infection, I guess one concern is bugs getting into the sinus now it’s been I opened up, so I’ll be continuing to slather chloramphenicol on that every day.
Right after the procedure she was happy and energetic and I felt like she was already feeling relief at no longer having the nasty lump on her face....I put her back with the other duckling and she was like running around, possibly just “hello I’m back” as he had been calling for her the entire time I was doing this, but I swear thee was also a hint of “look! Look at my face! It’s all fixed!” In her greeting to him lol.
I really hope she heals up without any complications. Anyone who has done this themselves on a bird and gotten a pile of gunk out, would love to hear how your bird recovered.
I don’t have any before photos but will try and post some afters
Anyway I had 4 ducklings with sever respiratory symptoms which I separated from the rest of the flock. Two died, and the other two survived but one started to get a swollen sinus. I left it for a while as I have a few ducklings in the past get swollen sinuses and they have resolved with no treatment or with nasal/nare flush with a syringe of saline and a touch of colloidal silver.
However this ducklings sinus got bigger and bigger and finally I decided to take it to the vet but my bird vet wasn’t working today, and the clinic is about 40-50km from where I live, I was gong out there today anyway so had hoped I could get the duckling seen at the same time.
As I am pretty busy at the moment, rather than have to drive out there tomorrow or next week I decided to do a video search on sinus draining and found a video of a chap draining huge chunks of nasty cheesy pus out of various chickens eyes. Strangely this motivated me and I decided it was time to bite the bullet and deal with the ducklings sinus.
So for anyone’s reference who might want to try this (at your (or rather your duck’s) risk!) here is what I did.
I only did it a few hours ago and am posting this mostly because I am still in sheer awe of the amount of yellow very smelly cheesy stuff that came out of one sinus! Obviously it is too soon yet to tell if there will be complications such as infection. Even if there is a wound infection I still think that it probably isn’t as bad as what it was!
So for pain relief, I got alocal anaesthetic cream that can be purchased here over the counter called Emla. It’s a combination of two local anaesthetics lidocaine 25mg/g and prilocaine 25mg/g
The trick with the local anaesthetic creams seems to be that they need to stay on the skin for at least an hr with plastic over the top. So how to achieve that in a duck?
What I did was get some double sided tape that is quite strongly sticky, stuck two layers together leaving the backing layer on each side, and cut out a small square shape, with a square hole in the centre the size of the area I needed to cover.
I then peeled off the backing on one side and stuck the square to a piece of clean clear plastic I cut to size from an (unused) sealable sandwich bag
I then put the Emla on the plastic in the centre of the square on the plastic on the other side, andafter wiping the area clean on the duckling and drying it with tissue, I stuck it on and hoped for the best.
An hour and a half later it was still stuck on so off we went.
Following advice I had found somewhere I made an incision along the bottom part of the swollen area.
This was wrong. I only found bloody tissue, blood and a slight bit of clear fluid there.
It also looked like there were a lot of blood vessels around the swollen area, and I was starting to think maybe the poor duckling had a carcinoma or something equally cancerous.
However at the same time I began to smell a nasty smell.. anyone who has done a real ripper of a bumblefoot will know the smell I mean! Which gave me hope (hope in that a smelly infection is better than a carcinoma!)
I think the clear fluid was emitting that smell. However at the same time I noticed that the clear fluid discharge from the ducklings nare on the swollen side, has some small cheesy chunks in it. Possibly my poking and prodding in the sinus had pushed some of the cheesy crap out the nare.
Anyway that prompted me to look closer at the overall nare area and I noticed there was some swelling where the beak ends and the feathers/skin start, that was not present on the opposite side. Aha! Here is my pus! So I started to cut it open. I had to go thru several layers of tissue, first the skin, then some sort of fibrous tissue then I was trying to make a small cut in what I assume was the sinus, when the duckling who I thyou ugh I had well restrained moved her head, and the cut was a little bigger than I had planned (I had wanted to make a tiny cut to see if I could see the caseous exudate I was expecting, before cutting her open further to get it out). Anyway the ducklings head movement actually resulted in the cut being the right size and I could see a large yellow, stinky cheesy lump in there. I gently started to squeeze mostly on the beak side, so between the beak and just under the eye and out came this huge cheesy lump, about 1.5 - 2cm long...
And another
And another
And half a dozen later out came what I thought was the core, so I’m thinking, thank god, we are done...but squeezed to check and out came another enormous 2cm lump
And another
And another
Seriously it was like ground hog day, except instead of rerunning the same day I kept rerunning the same huge lumps of nasty as yellow cheesy pus. I still can’t fathom how that much sheer volume of pus actually fit in there!
At the same time, lumps were coming out her nare. So I grabbed my last syringe of sterile saline and flushed it with that, had to apply a bit of force to evacuate another long thick chunk of yellow crap...
And still more is coming out of the nare....
By now, if this were cottage cheese, you would seriously have enough to generously spread (1/2 to 1cm, or around 1/3 an inch thick ) over a large slice of bread, edge to edge! Not exaggerating!
Another large chunk started sticking out of the nare and I was out of saline. I didn’t want to leave it to decided to risk some boiled water which I had to mix with tap water to get it cool enough to use straight away, plus salt to make it saline, and some oxytetracycline, and flushed the next lot of chunky cheese out of the nare with that by flushing thru the opposite nare. I kept flushing till no more came out and also pressed the sinus and get all the rest I could out of there.
I would have liked to flush the sinus itself but didn’t want to stick a needle full of non sterile fluid into the sinus directly and figured it would be better to just fill it with antibiotic and flush later if it needed, after getting some more sterile saline. So I pushed some chloramphenicol ointment into the sinus and glued it 2/3 of the way closed (though it was sitting closed and not pulling open anyway. I left the bottom part open so it could drain and incase I needed to get more crap out. I will probably glue that area in the next few days unless it closes by itself.
The duckling tolerated the whole procedure really well and only a couple of small yelps to indicate pain. She didn’t appear to feel any pain at all for most of the cutting, and from personal experience using Emla to numb an infection I lanced in my own finger, I can say it does definitely completely numb the skin if you leave it under plastic for an hr or more.
I also gave the duckling some meloxicam for pain relief once the Emla wore off, and for swelling, and she is already on tylosin so will continue on that,
Half an hr later it had swollen up a little and I was hoping that was just due to the trauma from me cutting it, and a few hrs after that the swelling had reduced. I will be watching her carefully for any signs of infection over the next few days and if I were going to attempt this again I would definitely make sure I had a lot more sterile saline and sterile syringes on hand, I had one sterile syringe, which I used to flush her nares out, but once I got into it I wished I had at least one more sterile syringe to flush the nare itself outplus more saline, I would also have used sterile needles to be able to flush the nare out as the syringe by itself is too big to be pushing around in there.
I will try and remember to post updates on her recovery and any complications.
I also would definitely not attempt this without antibiotics oral and topical. And for me, I already knew the duckling had recovered from likely mycoplasma and the swelling was most likely a large lump of cheesy pus that was caused by an infection that she has now recovered from, just the body can’t get rid of that pus. I’d also seen the photos of the sinus of the duckling who was sacrificed (would have died anyway) and had seen huge lumps of yellow cheesy stuff in the sinus and the vet had said that antibiotics cannot rid them of this cheesy stuff once it forms, so even th ughnthe active infection appears to be well over, the cheesy stuff needed to be physically removed.
She did appear to be getting rid of some via her nares, but seeing how much was in there, I doubt she could have ever gotten it all out that way (she’d had died of old age first!)
So if a duck had swelling from an unknown cause, it might be differnt
This wee girl was in good spirits and normal energy and appetite aside from the swollen sinus. When she was sick with the respiratory infection her and the other survivor were lethargic and not eating or drinking much. And both are stunted and behind where they should be size wise, but are very energetic, eating like horses, and so on. So I don’t know if that will make a difference recovery wise, but I am fairly confident the bug behind the original infection is no longer active and therefore hopefully there is less risk of infection in the area, and the chloramphenicol plus continuing the tylosin will keep her from getting any infection, I guess one concern is bugs getting into the sinus now it’s been I opened up, so I’ll be continuing to slather chloramphenicol on that every day.
Right after the procedure she was happy and energetic and I felt like she was already feeling relief at no longer having the nasty lump on her face....I put her back with the other duckling and she was like running around, possibly just “hello I’m back” as he had been calling for her the entire time I was doing this, but I swear thee was also a hint of “look! Look at my face! It’s all fixed!” In her greeting to him lol.
I really hope she heals up without any complications. Anyone who has done this themselves on a bird and gotten a pile of gunk out, would love to hear how your bird recovered.
I don’t have any before photos but will try and post some afters
