Chicken can't stand or walk, paralyzed??

[Young chicken mama]

So my mom has small mini farm and she has some hens and a rooster. She had a stroke about 3 months ago so we're all trying to take care of her animals for her. My stepdad pointed out that one of the chickens had been laying under the ramp in the chicken coop for 4 days and not moving. On the 5th day, I went out there to check on her and she seems to be paralyzed. I brought her to my house and put her in a crate with some food and water. She is eating some and drinking but she does not move at all so we move her around to different spots in the cage several times a day. We also cut all the feathers underneath her around her vent because her poop had gotten caked on her when she was laying there for several days before I was alerted to the situation. We also have horses and they do go down and eat the horse feed that the horses drop. So I'm thinking possibly she got stepped on by 1 of the horses. I palpated her spine and as I got closer to her tail she squalked. Is there such thing as doing an x-ray on a chicken? I'm an animal lover but never saw myself falling in love with a chicken until we brought her up here and my husband named her Ethel. I've done a lot of reading and I'm thinking Marek's disease. Maybe? My mom has gotten her chickens from different places over the years. She's not a chicken farmer or anything of sorts. She just has a few chickens and collects the eggs. Another thing about this hen is that most of the time her beak is down in the ground but she does have the ability to lift her head. And her head is not twisted like what I read about wry neck. I feel like she's losing weight. I've never really held a chicken to know how their bones feel, but she just looks skinny looking at her breast bone. I have an appointment tomorrow morning for my mother's Great Pyrenees and I thought about taking the chicken with me but I know she will just tell me to put her to sleep. She's a country vet and knows farm animals well, but she's also very conservative. Any thoughts on what I can do to give this girl a chance would be greatly appreciated. Something else I noticed tonight is that when I held her in my lap upside down and stretched her legs, she would try to pull them back, not quickly or with any strength, but there is some resistance there. She has been at my house in the crate since Jan 3rd with little if any improvement. View attachment 3373001View attachment 3373002

Does this chicken have a third leg on the chest? From the photo on its back it kinda looks like that. If so that might be a start to those problems

 

[Gotalotofpetstoo]

Does this chicken have a third leg on the chest? From the photo on its back it kinda looks like that. If so that might be a start to those problems

No, no 3rd leg. And she is back on her feet and doing remarkably well considering she has Salpingitis and Marek's and is blind.

 

[Gotalotofpetstoo]

So I haven't posted much recently, but I wanted to let everyone know that Ethel is still doing well. She isn't sitting back down every few steps. We are still tube feeding her, and this is the regimen of vitamins etc that she gets daily.
*B-100 complex crushed into her formula 1 x day
*Vitamin D 25mcg/1000IU 1 x day
*A sliver of Selenium 200mcg per tablet/not sliver, 2 x day
*Calcium Citrate 600mg 1 x day
*Vitamin E 670mg/1000IU 2 x day
*Poultry nutri-drench 1ml 2 x day mix in her formula
*Cephalexin 250mg 2 x day
*Her formula is Kaytees baby bird feed, 1 scoop 2 x day (trying to get her back up tonl 3 x day but she's much stronger and more feisty than she was when we were doing this months ago, making to harder for me to do alone when my husband is off working.
* I wanted to start her on a probiotic since she has been on the antibiotics cephalexin for at least 5 weeks, but she refuses to eat yogurt. Any recommendations on a liquid or powder probiotic that I can mix into her formula would be greatly appreciated. I have Google and researched several different ones, just not sure exactly what she needs. One of them I looked at said that she needed to be off of her antibiotic for at least 12 days before I should start a probiotic, but I am of course concerned about stopping these cephalexin again since she went downhill so quickly when we stopped at previously.

She did give us a scare Friday morning, we got up and got her out of her night time coop and set her on the floor to walk around as she always does, while waiting for her first feeding. We went back in a few minutes later and she was doing a complete nosedive, couldn't hold her a head up at all, but she was still standing. I immediately put her into a Epsom salt bath and she came out back to her normal self. I know we're playing the time game now but I want to keep her as happy as can be as long as possible of course.
Just before her nosedive
Then after her nosedive
https://photos.app.goo.gl/EwKy9kRSr6X21ejd6
She also isn't wanting to eat much of anything 9n her 9wn. Maybe because we are tube feeding her?
@Allsfairinloveandbugs
@azygous
@mrskenmore
@Wyorp Rock
@coach723

 

[Allsfairinloveandbugs]

This could be easily be mixed into her feed concoction.

Also, I bought drinkable yogurt at Aldi last year when a hen expelled a collapsed egg. My hens's appetite was extremely poor for the next 4 weeks, and all she would eat on her own were live mealworms and the drinkable yogurt. That would also be extremely easy to mix into her food for the feeding tube. You could even see if she would drink it on her own.
Here is liquid yogurt sold at Walmart.

Thank you for llisting all the meds and supplements Ethel is receiving. That will be very helpful to have in one post for anyone who needs to know how to treat a hen in the future with similiar symptoms as Ethel.

Her nosedive is one thing, but to me, the fact she couldn't seem to know how to right herself is more concerning. That looks neurological to me, but I've only seen something similiar in two old dogs. (Neither was good.) But I'm gonna defer to the medical experts you tagged, and wait and see what they say about Ethel.

 

[mrskenmore]

How is Ethel getting on since she took a spill? I know chickens regulate the hungry meter by how full their crop is. So it sounds like Ethel doesn't have interest in food since you are tube feeding her which is totally normal. Is she still having issues righting herself?

 

[Gotalotofpetstoo]

How is Ethel getting on since she took a spill? I know chickens regulate the hungry meter by how full their crop is. So it sounds like Ethel doesn't have interest in food since you are tube feeding her which is totally normal. Is she still having issues righting herself?

She is standing straight up as always except that one nose dive, ever since we gave her The Epsom salt bath

 

[mrskenmore]

She is standing straight up as always except that one nose dive, ever since we gave her The Epsom salt bath

That's great news! Happy to hear it!

 

[Gotalotofpetstoo]

Does anyone think that her beak could be causing her issues with eating? The bottom has been chipped like that for a long time, since we got her if I'm not mistaken, but I just recently noticed the top beak as well now. When it closes it does close evenly though but just wondered if that could be causing her pain or difficulty picking up food.

 

[Allsfairinloveandbugs]

Her beak does appear to be more chipped than in her earlier photos. (The best early photos of her beak were in your posts #1 and #76.) It is interesting that you asked about rickets a little earlier in this thread, because rickets could cause a beak to be weaker and more likely to crack. @azygous said that the only way to know if Ethel's calcium/phosphorous ratio is off-kilter is by a blood test.

Here is an interesting thread where @TwoCrows posted some good medical info, and also mentioned that using rubber feeders will help prevent a weak beak from incurring further injury.
https://www.backyardchickens.com/threads/pullets-beak-wont-stop-breaking.1075832/

Like you, I will wait to hear more from others. Meanwhile; I want to say that going back to the beginning of this thread reinforces yet again how far Ethel has come. You, your husband and Ethel have truly taken an incredible journey!

 

[Gotalotofpetstoo]

Okay, so there are a few things going on. Ethel took another nose dive this evening, late, about 9:30 ish p.m. I gave her an Epsom salt bath and let her soak for approximately 30 minutes. Time, she did not seem to enjoy it and relax as much this time as she did the two previous times. But we got through it and got her dry and she is back up right again. There are several things that I want to talk about in this post.....
#1: Ethel has been moving her neck around. Kind of like her neck is dancing, for at least the last 2 months. I put a link to a video below that shows as best as I could get, what I'm referring to. This time it just happened to be during her bath this evening. One might also say her neck dances is like a cobra. I searched for information on chicken's neck dancing and came up with two answers that I'm wondering about now. One is Wry neck and the other called it slinky neck or head tracking, having something to do with their eyesight, which I find interesting because we still think Ethel is blind. I did dangle a warm in front of her face several weeks ago and she never acknowledged it. Her pupils are still reacting too light though. I'm thinking maybe she's got our number
The wry neck, I read somewhere but can't find it now that there is an antibiotic that I'm pretty sure starts with an "M" that is used to treat this. It seems like I read that her dosage would be something like 1 mg and my husband actually has a bottle of that medication in 15 mg pills. So any thoughts from you guys as to maybe wry neck or just slinky neck? Which if I understand correctly is something they are supposed to do so it wouldn't be a bad thing?
#2: I finally remembered to check the date on the bag of food that we got maybe a month ago and it is dated January 30th 2023 which means It is just over 4 months old now and approximately 3 months old when these new nose dives and the imbalance staying 9n her perch started. Do I need to look for a food that is even more fresh than that?
#3: BIG ???.... Ethel is still taking cephalexin 250 mg 2 x day. We did take her off it a while back but that's when she was having trouble balancing and only taking a few steps before sitting down so we started her back on the cephalexin and that issue has never come back. It was recommended I get her on a probiotic and yogurt was recommended but she wants nothing to do with that so I was looking at Dumor probiotic multi-species powder that I can add into her tube feeding formula. I did see where sav-a-chick was mentioned but what I found is only a three pack where one pack is used per day. But wouldn't I want to keep her on it longer than 3 days? Whether I get the sav a chick or the dumor powder?? I also read somewhere that they should be off the antibiotic for so much time before starting the probiotic but I don't want to take her off the cephalexin because she declined previously when we tried that, so can she have the probiotic powder along with the cephalexin?

It's going on 2:30 a.m. so that is all I can think of at the moment.....

https://photos.app.goo.gl/9UsUZEupAQguPQBe6

@Allsfairinloveandbugs
@mrskenmore
@azygous
@Wyorp Rock