Emergency!!! Egg bound hen with Huge egg visible inside vent please help!!!

[PippinTheChicken]

Rest in peace Shelly.
@Allsfairinloveandbugs you tried all you could, but putting her out of her pain was the best choice for you and her.

 

[LaFleche]

I am sorry you lost your beautiful girl.

 

[NatJ]

It was a real egg.
Yet extracting the egg by any means possible still wouldn't have saved her.

I don't understand why you are saying that. Were the other eggs loose in her abdomen?

Because if they were just backed up in the oviduct, I would have expected them to come out if you removed the one that was stuck.

(I'm not saying you are wrong, just trying to understand why you said that. I don't know much about reproductive problems in hens.)

NECROPSY
When I lifted her breast up, I was mortified.
A thick layer of fat covered all organs except her elongated liver lobes. Intermingled with all the other organs, more fat. Lots more.

A layer of fat like that is very common in laying hens. Yes, yours was a bit excessive, but I would be more worried to open up a hen and find NO fat.

When a hen goes broody, she doesn't eat much, but lives off that stored fat.
I know your hen was not broody, but nature still tries to have every hen store up fat just in case they do go broody. A hen with no fat will typically not lay eggs, either. (The obvious goal is to have the right amount of fat, but since the fat is hiding inside the abdomen it's really hard to check on a live chicken!)

Nothing was what I expected to find when I opened her up.

I'm flabbergasted.

Definitely some surprises there!
But thank you for sharing, so more of us can learn from what happened to Shelly.

 

[Allsfairinloveandbugs]

I don't understand why you are saying that. Were the other eggs loose in her abdomen?

Because if they were just backed up in the oviduct, I would have expected them to come out if you removed the one that was stuck.

Thank you for your informative post. I've done random necropsies in hens before, and never saw Anything like that amount of fat.

The reason I made the comment "I couldn't have saved her anyway", is because i thought the excessive fat would be fatal in its own right, & that somehow it caused her inability to push the egg out. Like maybe the excess fat was constricting her cloaca? Otherwise i don't understand how 2 calcium tablets, moist towel, heating pad, steamed bathroom, epsom salts soak, and my strong attempts to pull along with her strong attempts to push were fruitless. (I damaged her prolapsed vent tissue the second time in my desperate attempts to remove the egg. That was the reason i had vent slathered with veterycin and antibiotic ointment. I felt terrible for hurting her, but she seemed to understand i was trying to help her, and made no protest.) I suspect this may have been her first egg of the laying season; maybe that had something to with it idk. After the first calcium citrate tablet caused strong contractions, when I reached in vent and got finger behind egg to pull, I felt some sort of resistance behind the egg as if it was attached to "something." I quit pulling out of fear I would pull something out that needed to stay in. After the second calcium tablet and second attempt I didn't feel resistance behind the egg, but still it wouldn't budge past a certain point.

If what I said in above paragraph is off-base, someone please feel free to correct me. I learned a lot here ready.

Re necropsy, there were no other eggs or yolks behind the stuck egg. That doesn't surprise me because she was never a great layer in the first place. (3-4 eggs weekly her first year.) The runny yolk that spilled out of her vent was surely another (shell-less?) egg, but that was it. I'm no expert in reproductive problems either, which is why I came here in desperation after 4 hours trying to get it out myself, even though I knew I probably couldn't post pics. (Thank you again everyone, for trying to help anyway. )

If there had been any chance to get the egg out, it would have been after the first or second calcium tablet. I had a hammer and chisel to break the egg the next morn as suggested by @casportpony , but despite a 3rd calcium tablet, contractions never came and the egg never reappeared. The egg always receded back into her vent after contractions stopped, and I could barely reach it with one finger

Ps. @tripletfeb , thank you for the update on the video with severely prolapsed hen with stuck egg. My thought as soon as I finished watching video was " I wonder if the hen made a full recovery from that?" The lady made a herculean attempt to get the egg out and succeeded in doing so, but if I ever came upon such a horrible sight, my instinct would be to immediately euthanize. Your update validated my thought.

.

 

[NatJ]

Thank you for your informative post. I've done random necropsies in hens before, and never saw Anything like that amount of fat.

It definitely can vary, but I think I've butchered more fat hens than skinny ones over the years. (Usually it's healthy hens that are getting older and need to make way for younger ones, so the fat isn't causing any obvious problems for them.) So to my eyes, the fat is just the way some hens are.

The reason I made the comment "I couldn't have saved her anyway", is because i thought the excessive fat would be fatal in its own right, & that somehow it caused her inability to push the egg out. Like maybe the excess fat was constricting her cloaca?

I would not have thought so, but I certainly see your point about SOMETHING being wrong. You're right, that egg SHOULD have come out!

I don't see anything else that would have caused this, so maybe in her case the fat was the problem.

Re necropsy, there were no other eggs or yolks behind the stuck egg.

I thought you said you broke two other eggs as you were removing fat to find the stuck egg? Were they behind the stuck egg? Or had she laid them internally somehow?

 

[the_kitchen__drawer]

I am so, so sorry for your loss. Shelly is a beautiful hen, and her patience when you were trying to save her showed me her personality in the course of 10 minutes I read this. I will be honest, I cried. I can’t imagine how you feel. I just thought it was important for you to know your Shelly made an impact on someone who didn’t know her until she had passed. Thank you for this thread, her necropsy photos, your time. sincerely.

 

[Aunt Angus]

Imo, you tried everything other than breaking the egg to get it out if her. But breaking an egg internally is often a death knell because of the internal damage and infections it can cause. Something was definitely wrong. I really don't think even breaking the egg could have saved her.

 

[Allsfairinloveandbugs]

I thought you said you broke two other eggs as you were removing fat to find the stuck egg? Were they behind the stuck egg? Or had she laid them internally somehow?

I think there was speculation from others that there would be eggs backed up behind the stuck egg, but it wasn't said by me. The only evidence of another egg behind the stuck one was when I first pulled her out of the nest box and yellow yolk drained out of her vent. That "egg" must have been shell-less though, because I didn't find any broken shell pieces behind the stuck egg upon necropsy.

Your comments did cause me to think harder on two issues. The egg Seemed huge and stuck when she couldn't push it out. But I realized after reaching my finger inside her vent to get around the backside of egg, that maybe it wasn't so huge after all. Confirmed upon necropsy, the egg was on the upper end of large size, completely normal for her age and breed. Even though it was partially broken, it did seem more round-shaped than the typical egg.

Because the egg seemed to completely fill up her vent as she tried to push it out, my mind asked a question I didn't know the answer to. "When a hen lays an egg, which end exits first, the round side or pointy side?" For those who don't know (same as I didn't), the answer is that an egg travels through the oviduct pointy side first, then rotates in the uterus to eventually exit broad end first. So the problem was Not the egg being in a "breech" position.

But here is a possible epiphany. My knuckles did cause the egg to audibly crunch twice. At the time i assumed the shell was thin. But both times I heard crunches, I was actually removing the fat between the organs very gingerly, mainly because I was so appalled at all the fat. (I know you said that can be normal, but I've never seen even half that amount before.) I/we will never know for certain since I crunched it twice myself, but I'm now considering the egg was already cracked/broken inside her when I found her in the nest box. Due to prolapsed tissue, I could only get my finger behind the egg on the right side (her left), & the shell felt smooth and intact. But if it was already cracked/broken inside of her, that would explain why she couldn't expel it, correct? If so, this sad mystery has likely been solved.

 

[NatJ]

I think there was speculation from others that there would be eggs backed up behind the stuck egg, but it wasn't said by me.

But in the necropsy section you said...[goes and reads again]...

Assuming the cloaca held only a lash egg, I didn't take extreme care when I removed some of the the inter-organs fat. My knuckles inadvertently crushed an egg shell that i couldn't yet see. Twice. Both times I heard it crunch. The shell was surely thin since I didn't brush against it That hard, but it was otherwise a normal egg.

I originially read this as meaning there were two more eggs, that crunched, in addition to the one you knew was stuck.
Now I see you meant the one egg went "crunch" several times.

 

[Lenny loves chickens]

I just had a similar problem but she ended up getting the egg out. Look how tiny it was I am a little concerned. Should I be concerned? The big egg ended up pushing the small out.