Educational Necropsy Photos-GRAPHIC WARNING! Giant Cyst Contained This...Not Expected

[speckledhen]

Eggcessive, this is Cetawin. I am currently on the phone with Speckledhen who asked me to sign in for her and check her PMs and threads. I read her your post and she said to tell you thank you and your husband so much for this information. She will not be able to get online for an unknown time as lightening took out her modems and computer. Once she is able to get back here, I am sure she will thank you herself and discuss this great information with you.

 

[Eggcessive]

Eggcessive, this is Cetawin. I am currently on the phone with Speckledhen who asked me to sign in for her and check her PMs and threads. I read her your post and she said to tell you thank you and your husband so much for this information. She will not be able to get online for an unknown time as lightening took out her modems and computer. Once she is able to get back here, I am sure she will thank you herself and discuss this great information with you.

Thanks Cetawin (and Speckledhen.) Hope you get your computer back on--we had an outtage recently, and I realized how ridiculously addicted to this site that I am.

 

[seminolewind]

Thanks, Speckledhen, for posting the necropsy. Sorry you lost your hen.
I hope we can find out more about this cyst.

 

[speckledhen]

Our internet has been down since last week-lightning took out the router, modem and my entire computer system, plus blew another HDMI on the main TV, so trying to catch up with stuff now. Thanks to Cetawin, but I didn't want to keep bothering her to check my stuff on BYC all the time.

I don't know that the cyst had anything to do with Ellie's death. I'd say probably not. She'd had it for at least a couple of years and it had progressively enlarged over time. Neela, my blue Rock, has one as well, but it's still quite small, rather lumpy like it's just fluid and/or fat. Could be Ellie was just at her life's end.

 

[rebrascora]

I appreciate that this is an old thread and I cam upon it whilst looking for something else via the search facility, but my "gut" feeling (if you will excuse the pun) is that this was a herniated oviduct which was infected with salpingitis and she herniated trying to pass a lash egg. Some of the material is clearly egg like and the lighter coloured stuff that is like cooked chicken is probably just cheesy pus deposits. It would have been interesting if you had fully opened up the abdominal cavity to show the cist from the inside before you cut into it, but I guess we will never know now.

Really interesting to see the photos and read the case history though. Thanks for posting.

 

[speckledhen]

I appreciate the comment, but the "cooked chicken" was not what you'd call cheesy pus deposits, though there was a small amount of that in addition to the other stuff in the cyst. I've seen quite a few of those cheesy masses, having lost 15 or so hens to internal laying. I could show you a lot of pictures, having opened up hen after hen who died from it. She had never had egg issues and was a breeder quality hen, not immune, but certainly not the normal hatchery stock that almost every other hen was I've lost to EYP and/or internal laying. By the way, though I did not cut into her abdomen, I did peer up into it as far as I could from the hole in the back and saw nothing else out of the ordinary, only the weirdness inside the cyst.

So, no, this was not your normal thing. It was like the cysts where you find teeth and other bodily "things" inside in humans. I have one more hen with a similar cyst who is up in age and I may open that up as well when she passes, just to see if it was similar.

This is one of those "just when you think you've seen it all" things with chickens...