Recovery :-)

[Tanith BHH]

I don't know if this is the right place to put this so I'll put it in the Pictures and Stories as well. But to tell the truth, I'm not quite sure why I'm posting this, I suppose I'm just sharing my relief!

One of my hens had Impacted crop and I couldn't get rid of it. The olive oil and massaging didn't work, so I took her to the vet. All this time she was slowly loosing wait. She ended up sitting in the corner of the run, listless. I was very worried. She got thinner and thinner and thinner. Her comb flopped (she has a very big single comb) and paled considerably. She ignored food. The vet tried the massaging etc, a couple of times too. It didn't help. After a couple of visits, at last he said: "Your chicken is in danger of starvation. The only other option is to do an operation and get out whatever it is that's causing the blockage. But I've never done this before and it may not work, even if I had."

So obviously that was the only option. She is going to die anyway, so we may as well try, I thought. So we took her to the vets for the operation on Thursday. I couldn't concentrate on anything all day. Then the vet rang in the afternoon. I didn't answer it, my dad did. I heard him say: "Hello? Oh, hi... Oh! Excellent! We'll be up in a minute." I heard this from the other room and actually cried with relief as I knew what this meant!

We drove up to the surgery straight away to pick her up. She looked a little shocked but otherwise perky. We took her home, and she is now recovering in a pen in our conservatory (it is still too cold for her to overheat in there but not cold enough to freeze, so don't worry!). I am feeding her soaked layer's pellets and yogurt. When we got her home she just ATE!! She was so hungry, but I can already feel her fattening up. She is her normal bossy self now too. We calculated that she needs to lay about 120 eggs to pay for the vet bills!! But her eggs are enormous and blue when she does lay so I've said just 60

You can see the stitches where they stitched her crop back up

! She'll be going back with my other hens on Sunday.



Just thought I'd share my relief

Tanith

 

[Tanith BHH]

Woops, sorry! Not sure why the writing went brown, I didn't mean to do that!!!