Sick hen with foamy yellow poop. Help! Update: Diagnosed with egg yolk peritonitis

mama2girlies said:

I just recently went through this with my sweetest hen Lovey. She responded great to Baytril but now vet suspects she has a tear in her oviduct which is causing her to drop eggs into her abdomen. That means she will soon be sick again. Have you checked into hormone therapy and spaying? I wondering if there has been any success with these treatments. My vet said spaying is very expensive.

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I haven't read anything about oviduct tears causing this, but that certainly sounds like it could be a cause. Almost everything says that if a hen has the problem, it will continue for the rest of her laying career, so your vet is right that she is likely to get sick again. How's she doing now? Are you looking into a long-term solution?


Quote: Have you taken her in? What did they say? It sounds like you are taking great care of her. Keep it up! And don't worry about writing too much! I suppose I can't speak for everyone else, but I don't mind it at all. The more information, the better, in my opinion! There are people out there who might come across this thread and find it helpful.



And now for an update!
Gerdie had her last dose of the second round of Baytril on Wednesday. (Have I managed not to say her name this entire time? Oops! Her name is Gerdie. She says hi and thank you for your wonderful advice and comments) Her improvement has mostly level off since I last posted. She's almost her old self, but not quite. We just started having her sleep outside again. She is eating and drinking normally, and is still slowly gaining her weight back. She does normal chicken things but gets tired quickly and spends much more time than she used to napping, sunning herself, and taking dirt baths. This is especially true towards the end of the day, when she also starts to look a bit pale. I'm not particularly concerned by that. It will take a while for her to gain all her stamina back.

It is hard to tell if her abdomen feels extremely swollen or if it is a normal size and the rest of her is smaller from losing so much weight. I would guess that she is still laying internally based on the way it feels, though. Because of that, I'm going to look into getting her a hormone implant. I think it would be best to stop that buildup, and I do not want to put her through surgery. The prices for the spay are crazy high, too! Thanks for sharing those quotes. Keeping her on Baytril would only help ward off infection, while yolks kept accumulating in her abdomen. Right now I am trying to amass as much information on the implant as I can, so I have something to show our vet about it (I'll post it here for you all when I'm done). I would like to get an at least somewhat educated opinion from him about it before we do anything. I hope that with backyard chicken keeping on the rise, people will take more interest in their health and do studies on things like this.

At least she is somewhat good. Glad to hear that she is getting better!

Just read this very through and well done documentation and found it very interesting...

.....but wonders, @Hanna8 , how's the hen doing now?

Hi everybody, sorry for completely vanishing for so long. I swore I wouldn't after reading so many other threads that ended on cliffhangers like this, and never intended to wait so long to update. I'm afraid it's because things went in a way that makes them very tough to write about. I decided to wait a short while before posting but the longer I put it off, the easier it became to continue putting it off. But it's been a long time now and it is well past time to return and give some closure. For myself as much as for others who might read this.

Gerdie went downhill fast a day or two after my last post. We got her to an avian vet first thing in the morning. She was rushed to the back immediately and the vet was in the room within a minute. We began explaining her predicament and the vet picked her up to examine her. He said it felt like she was trying to pass another mass then began expressing his concern that her situation did not look good. At that point, she stopped breathing and was gone.

I am so thankful that she got a few days of happiness and feeling well before she left us. We got to have her for far longer than we probably should have. That hen had nine lives. She walked home half dead after being missing for hours twice. The second time, she collapsed next to my mom and then couldn't walk for over a month because her wounds were so bad. She became a house chicken for a while and seemed not to mind her injuries that much. She was just delighted by the constant attention and hand-fed spinach that they earned her. She was a very loved bird and we have yet to have one who's captured our hearts half as much.

My advice to anybody reading this who has a hen in a similar predicament is to get your hands on some Baytril ASAP, take no more than a day or two to research your options (spay, hormone implants, continued use of Baytril), and start acting as soon as you can. This is not something to be messed with, especially if there is infection involved. And if you only suspect that a hen has it, don't wait for it to progress to confirm it. Take her to a vet and share your concerns. I don't want any of you to make the same mistakes I did and hold off for too long. I don't know if I will ever forgive myself for that.

I haven't been in research frenzy mode about this since we had Gerdie, so I'm not sure what advancements, if any, have been made in understanding and treating peritonitis. I'd share the notes I collected a while ago, but I don't want to supply anybody with outdated information. It was all fairly general stuff I got by googling the names of the medications anyway. I believe for the hormone implant, it helped to not look specifically for use in chickens. I found that it was used in other kinds of birds for similar issues and in a variety of mammals and got a lot more information on it's general effects that way. Chicken-specific info is always best, there wasn't much out there at the time. I hope that chicken medicine advances over the years so we don't have to go through so much trouble over things like this.

If you guys have any questions, feel free to ask. I might be a little fuzzy on details since this was a while ago now, but I will do my best to answer them and others are likely to chime in.

I'm so sorry for your loss I'm going through this right now with one of my great gals and I've made the heartbreaking decision to have her put down. She's already dealt with it for months and now will hardly move. I'm devastated that after months of searching for a possible answer it took until the day of her severe suffering for me to finally figure it out.

ChirpyChicks1 said:

I'm so sorry for your loss

I'm going through this right now with one of my great gals and I've made the heartbreaking decision to have her put down. She's already dealt with it for months and now will hardly move. I'm devastated that after months of searching for a possible answer it took until the day of her severe suffering for me to finally figure it out.

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Then I can sadly say me too, as one of my best EE hens has the yellow poo and I only spotted it yesterday and just started giving her some med's ....

So sorry for your losses .....