Here's to "best guess" work when you have no clue what you're doing...
I just performed emergency crop surgery on a chicken. A **** cornish rock, of all things, too. Thank god I have a strong stomach for flesh and blood.
I went outside with scratch grain that I had just bought to feed everyone, and saw one chick dead in a nest box. Maybe it got too cold last night, since the heat lamp still isn't fixed. Either way, I went in to get it, and on the way back out of the pen, a cornish rock just fell over in front of me and started flopping around. I picked her up (despite nasty DUCK MUD all over her, and now on my clean shirt), and she was blue, and gasping.
So I held her, stretched her neck out, and expected her to die right there in my hands. But once her neck was stretched and she could get air into her lungs, she began to calm down and start breathing normal. So I started to check her out, and feel her neck. But once I got to the crop, I knew the issue. It was ROCK HARD! So impacted crop, right? But this one apparently was so bad it was cutting off her trachea so she couldn't breathe. She isn't big enough to process for meat yet, and since breathing was her only issue, I decided to try and fix it.
I've had no experience with impacted crop, or crop "surgery". But I know Mrsdszoo did it, and I know the crop sits right against the skin with no major organs in the way. And I didn't have time to research it myself, because she was having trouble breathing. I had to clear the pressure on the trachea and worry about everything else later. I had scalpels leftover from when I was dealing with someone's bumblefoot though. So I laid out a towel on the kitchen counter, grabbed a ton of gauze and unpackaged it to prepare for the bleeding, washed my hands (I didn't want to waste time finding gloves), laid the chicken on her side, found a spot with no feathers (easy to do on a cornish rock) and cut it open.
Right away, tons of cat food pellets started to spill out. She had gorged herself on cat food when she found it, and ate SO MUCH without drinking any water what so ever. So her crop was packed, dry, and nothing could move around. She hadn't drank any water to soften it, and no grit to crush it up. I emptied most of it out, leaving a few pieces for her to actually digest for energy during recovery. Then I stitched the crop itself up, and stitched the skin up on top of that. And since she was covered in duck-poop mud, I gave her a quick bath afterwards, making sure to avoid the wound, but clean up most of the blood around it.
Now she's wrapped in a towel, sitting in a square container on the floor of my closet with a heating pad under the towel. As soon as I had finished sewing her up, and before I gave her the bath, she stood up and started to cluck.
Success.
But also a reminder of just how food-driven these cornish rocks can be. She actually filled herself up so much, she couldn't breathe! I can't wait until they are big enough to process, because at this rate I'm going to have to watch them EVERY SINGLE TIME I feed them to make sure none of them do this again.
Now I'm going to research all of this online, and see what I need to do about the internal versus external stitches. I just used plain needle and thread, but with two layers to stitch, I'm guessing I'll have to cut the skin later on just to remove the crop stitches.
I suspect my CCLs are reaching the end of their laying cycle. I collected this egg today. It has a little mud on it from the sloppy conditions this weekend. I have been told that this is a sign that they are about to stop laying. The odd thing is that while this egg has warts some of the others were porous. Today is day 21 for 11 CCLs, 5 have already hatched, 1 pipped and 5 still waiting.
