I was fortunately able to find a vet who owns chickens and frequently brings them into the clinic to treat them. She couldn't detect any stuck eggs or vent blockages, but was very concerned about the weight loss. So we actually had to do an x-ray. Most of everything, including heart, lungs, etc looked fine on the x-ray however the vet said that it looks like she has an air sack infection. Never in my life have I heard of such a thing! She was showing us x-rays of healthy birds, and the air sacks were clearly visible. On my hen's x-ray, you could barely see them whatsoever. The vet says she has never seen this in a chicken before, and it mainly occurs in other avian species such as parrots. It made me wonder if it has happened to other chickens too, but due to lack of an x-ray gets written off as something else. This particular infection could be either bacterial or fungal, but without doing a biopsy of the air sack we can't know for certain.
So after that insane diagnosis, the vet gave us antibiotic pills, an antifungal medication, antibiotic foot soak for her bumblefeet, and topical ointment for her feet. This was not a cheap visit to the vet. And let me tell you, if you have never tried to feed pills to a chicken, you are missing out on getting violently bitten and pecked at in rage.
Anyway, this course of treatment is what the vet said she would do if it was one of her birds. She did warn us, though, that a lot of internal infections can be fatal because chickens will not start exhibiting symptoms that something is wrong until the illness is advanced enough to be quite serious. So I can imagine there's a lot that we are just not able to catch in time.
I might make a separate post about this just for informative purposes since I never even knew anything could go wrong with their air sacks.
So after that insane diagnosis, the vet gave us antibiotic pills, an antifungal medication, antibiotic foot soak for her bumblefeet, and topical ointment for her feet. This was not a cheap visit to the vet. And let me tell you, if you have never tried to feed pills to a chicken, you are missing out on getting violently bitten and pecked at in rage.
Anyway, this course of treatment is what the vet said she would do if it was one of her birds. She did warn us, though, that a lot of internal infections can be fatal because chickens will not start exhibiting symptoms that something is wrong until the illness is advanced enough to be quite serious. So I can imagine there's a lot that we are just not able to catch in time.
I might make a separate post about this just for informative purposes since I never even knew anything could go wrong with their air sacks.
