Someone told me BYC is not my personal blogging space. That's why I've been so hesitant to post updates here and finally decided to stop.
But I won't be bullied in my life anymore, so here's a summary of Henry's recovery process, shared in the spirit of hoping this someday helps someone else. Note that he was attacked by a coyote on October 11, and his wounds were deep and extensive. This summary mostly focuses on the injury to his right leg.
- Henry's injured right leg has gone through several stages of healing and recovery. The day of the attack, his leg was totally limp and loose, from the hip on down to his toes. I suppose you could call this paralysis, as he showed no indication of movement, pain or awareness in that leg — and then he lost his ability to stand on the left leg.
- Initially there wasn't a visible indication of an injury. No swelling or wounds, no blood or redness or protruding bones. The leg looked perfectly fine, which led me to suspect nerve damage from a very deep and serious wound on the lower portion of the right side of his upper body, just under the wing.
- For some reason I feel anxious and unsettled when reading my earlier posts, so this is all from memory; therefore the timeline may be off. But I think it wasn't until two days after the attack that I noticed a small pink discoloration on the leg scales. In just another day or so it developed into more of a reddish color with slight swelling.
- As the redness and swelling increased, I researched every possibility and surmised it must be due to one of the following: the coyote broke or fractured Henry's leg without causing it to bleed; a couple days of immobility may have led to the development of bed sores; or he had a preexisting condition such as scaly leg mites or Mereck's disease.
- Sometime during the first week, I found some untreated wounds on Henry's undercarriage. I was so focused on the sucking body cavity wound and other serious wounds, that I had neglected to do a full examination. When I turned him over to trim feathers and apply honey, I noticed the pad on the bottom of his right foot was hard and swollen, and it was covered in a dark callous reminiscent of a bumble foot injury.
- That was one more area I had neglected to examine. A day or two later, as Henry's leg worsened and became alarmingly red and even more swollen, I soaked his foot and then turned him over and used a sterilized razor blade to scrape away layers of the callous, careful not to actually cut into his foot and perform surgery. It didn't take long for the thick callous to come off, revealing smooth, undamaged skin underneath.
- With bumble foot, the swollen hard pad often indicates the presence of pus, which lots of people say must be removed. But here and there a few quiet voices have said pus can sometimes dissolve on its own and that a noninvasive approach can be successful. I was satisfied with how this procedure went and decided to rely on epsom salt soaks, a drawing salve and honey to address the possibility of pus. Eventually the swelling in the pad healed and no further treatments were needed.
- I wasn't sure if the pad had been damaged by the coyote, but I did know from months of quietly lurking in the forum that bumble foot can lead to serious leg infections, and infections can go systemic, so it seemed like a possible explanation for what was happening to Henry's leg.
- However, when a red patch began to form on Henry's good leg, I began to really worry. His serious upper body wounds were showing remarkable healing from the Manuka honey treatments. As each day rolled along, I could see measurable progress and felt very encouraged. But what was happening with his legs was unexpected and alarming, and now with his good leg showing signs of decline, I began to question whether I was prolonging Henry's suffering and felt disheartened and really unsure of myself.
- Scales darkened and began to fall off, the redness deepened, and overnight the swelling seemed to significantly increase. I don't multitask well at all, so throughout this experience I fell behind on other projects and pretty much lived and breathed Henry and his recovery process. He didn't need me by his side all the time, but at one point I even ended up sleeping in his room. He was attacked when he was free ranging, and I felt responsible for what had happened. This development with his legs kind of broke me down and left me feeling like something horrible was happening to Henry that I couldn't stop. This was when I reached out to someone in the forum for some guidance on best practices for humanely ending my dear boy's suffering.
- Each day, though, I would wake up to a vibrant Henry. No changes to his eating or drinking or backend production unit habits (I will never be comfortable with the word
poop, although I'm prone to saying far worse than that); no decrease in his desire to socialize with his hens. No signs of depression or a decrease in his vitality. The rooster just kept on going, and with encouragement from you, I kept on going, too.
- Then one morning I noticed a very slight decrease in the swelling on his right leg. The night before, I doused the entirety of his leg in turmeric extract. It stained absolutely everything, including Henry, the towels, the floor, and a small area on my neck and the side of my nose (can't explain that one). With the honey on his upper body wounds, an epsom salt brine all over, diced cilantro treats, and a turmeric dousing, he looked ready for the fryer — and remarkably he also looked like his legs were beginning to heal.
- The healing process felt like a series of frames in a slow moving movie, and some of his progress I wasn't grasping. It wasn't until I started posting videos here (at
@Birdinhand's suggestion) that I was able to round out my understanding of just how much Henry was improving. You were able to see new developments I wasn't quite detecting on my own.
- Here's a summary to the summary to compact some of it together:
total paralysis; slight movement in his hip (thanks to @biophiliac's homeopathic coaching); remarkable movement in his hip and the ability to now lift and adjust his leg; the ankle frozen hard and locked down without any bend or movement; some slight pressing down on the leg, with the back of the knee joint used as a surrogate foot; growing mobility in his hip and daily practice in figuring out how to stand on his good leg, while resting the injured leg down on the floor; taking short, wobbly steps; progression to steps where there was now some space between the back of the knee and the floor; a gradual release in the knee joint that allowed for a more upright position to his mobility; the ankle joint remained swollen and hard with no movement, but the toes began to spread open and fan out just a bit.
- And as of the last few days, Henry's ankle has relaxed significantly and now he has some flexibility and bend, and just today, for the first time since the attack, his toes slightly cupped and wrapped around my finger during a massage.
- The consensus seems to be that Henry had a break or fracture, probably to his ankle joint, and edema from the lack of mobility. I learned that redness and swelling, even to an extreme, doesn't always imply infection and is often necessary for healing, and I also learned that nerve damage can heal but the process is lengthy and can be very painful.
So, that concludes the leg recovery summary.
One aspect of Henry's healing I don't think I addressed was his unintentional consumption of Manuka honey. I haven't come across anything that says it's safe to give chickens, or animals of any kind, honey internally. But it couldn't be helped. As he recovered from shock and became more alert, he would turn his head and stick his beak in the honey and ingest some because he didn't have a choice.
Once, when I was giving him some homeopathic pellets — small white balls I would place in a round ceramic dish for him to chase down — a lone pellet got stuck on the very tip of his beak. The honey held it in place. And often in the mornings I would find feathers stuck to his beak and see specks of food stuck near his honey covered wounds from his early morning self-exams.
Henry was pretty much consuming honey every day for several weeks. Were someone to tell me this had no bearing on his recovery, I would have to disagree. But I don't exactly have a test rooster or a placebo rooster I can point to and say, "See? The ingested honey really
did help!"
So I'm asking you to trust me on this. TRUST ME. It always creeps me out when someone says that.
Anyway, consider this post the grand finale summary of Henry's healing process — just in time for Christmas and the New Year. I have two more videos I'd like to film and share with you sometime soon, but for now I really wanted to write down this experience with Henry's leg recovery. So many times I felt rather ill and upset, and couldn't believe it seemed to all come down to the unexplained swelling in his legs, that Henry may not recover, despite miraculous healing elsewhere.
But the dang bird lives, thanks to you and your gentle and patient encouragement and guidance. I'm very grateful. You put up with pages and pages of my rambling need to document this process. Writing is pretty much all I have to help me make sense of things. Thanks for your eyeballs on Henry and your eyeballs on these words.
G'night, folks.
You have done very well taking caring of him and documenting each stage. 
