- Sep 23, 2014
- 2,176
- 348
- 208
She did live... I also had one like that, and like her, I chose not to sew it. Not because i thought it shouldn't be sewn, but because I didn't have the supplies.
Since amprolium is not an antibiotic, no script needed.
-Kathy
@PeaLover130 still tells people about the time I sewed up her chicken chick on the kitchen table. I can't remember if I used the invisible thread or the fishing line -- I just remember scavenging the house and garage for adaptable materials and dousing all my stuff with rubbing alcohol. I just used a regular sewing needle in what seemed like an appropriate size. A curved one would definitely be easier. I think I used neosporin on the chick afterwards, and probably some Bactine and some alcohol beforehand -- didn't have all the great meds I do now. It was newly hatched, cold, and its guts were hanging out. I first thought its navel hadn't closed, but when I started working on it, I discovered the navel was fine, but it had a bunch of tear & puncture wounds from the adult birds savaging it. Didn't have much yolk sac, so it may have been older than I realized at the time. I left it cold while I sewed it up, then popped it under a heat lamp. Astonishingly, it lived and grew up.
Nice medical supplies are great to have on hand... sterile ones are fantastic. In a pinch, fishing line and invisible thread are both monofilaments that lots of folks have lying around. I still remember when I was really young and one of our much older neighbors happened by and was showing my father where he had sewn himself up earlier that morning from some gardening incident. I doubt if he used anything other than sewing thread. He was born in the last century (the one that started with 18, not 19), and out of necessity, people took care of things at home then that would make our hair stand on end now. Of course, some of them died too -- my father had gangrene as a youngster in the days before antibiotics were available -- a miracle that he lived.
When I was deciding what to do with the torn up chick, I worried that sewing up the abdomen could lead to peritonitis. But it was clearly going to die without intervention, so I did what I could and by the grace of God it worked out.