I helped it out completely. I basically held the egg in my hand and cut the shell apart with a small pair of bandage scissors which have one blade rounded and not sharp on the tip. Almost all of the membrane was stuck to the shell...as it should be...and only a few places (on the head and one wing) was it stuck to the chick. There was a lot of room between the eggshell and the chick in like 85% of the egg. The two places the chick was stuck to the membrane...I cut the membrane away from the shell and when the chick was out, I pulled those pieces off the chick's head, and shoulder/wing. The chick was quite dry, but not fluffy. It sort of looks like it was slicked down with hair gel. It was only very wet near the bottom of the shell, away from the hole. Looks to me like it had time to dry in the 36 hours after it had poked the dime sized hole.
It had been struggling and peeping for a day and a half and I figured it was time to help it out. In that time apparently it absorbed the egg sack, and it had disengaged from the umbilicus. It just couldn't turn in the shell to chip away all around the top of it so it could push out and be born. In the day and a half all it did was make the pip hole bigger and bigger until it could not reach further with it's beak...as its head was stuck to the shell.
I don't know what would have happened if I had tried to wet the membrane. The dry membrane stuck to the chick was covered by shell, so first I started cutting the shell/membrane away where I could see a gap between that and the chick. The chick was pretty loose inside the shell. By the time I'd cut most of the top off and got to the stuck part...which is where it needed to be wet...I could see that the rest of the chick was just laying loose in the shell bottom. So I clipped off the bottom, and removed the shell fragments stuck to the membrane and head and shoulder...and peeled off the membrane. It seemed kind of pointless to leave it just laying loose in the shell bottom and letting it climb out by itself. It was so loose in there that it basically fell out into my other hand.
It is laying on a kleenex nest, under a small clear glass bowl in the brooder tub. So far it is breathing and hasn't died. The other chicks are trying to peck it through the glass. I figure if it is going to die, it will do so pretty quickly.
