Cynthia is in the pet carrier, on fresh straw, in reach of water, tucked up and sleeping soundly in our bedroom. She’s on another course of nystatin and baytril, with avipro and CCF in her water to try and help her along. I picked her up to bring her inside today - she was looking so fed up and forlorn - and as I bent down to pick up my glove on the floor, her beak opened and out streamed a mass of yellowy smelly fluid. So it could be sour crop.

Our vet agreed that she’s go a slightly swollen abdomen - she said it could be the start of EYP, but it could also be many other things - bit like having bad headaches I suppose, there’s lots of things that can cause it. Anyway, we are going to review Cyn in a week after her course of treatment, and if all is still not right then she’ll go in for a general anaesthetic so they can do an exploratory surgery and a crop flush. I’ve read about the crop flush method where you massage the crop, turn the chicken upside down and flush, but I really didn’t want to do this. You can risk the chicken aspirating (inhaling the fluid into their lungs) and choking, and that’s not a risk I’m willing to take with Cynthia. Crop flushes via a small incision into the crop skin can be done, but the skin around that area doesn’t always heal well, and there’s a risk of infection. Our vet is very good, she’s always careful to explore all different avenues and always happy to answer all our questios and phonecalls. Does make life a bit easier.

So I guess it’s a bit of a waiting game to see if she gets better. She seems to like being indoors to get some peace and quiet for herself, especially since Yoko has taken to picking on her. She’ll move out of the bedroom when we go to bed, we’ll have to make her a special run in the conservatory again, it gets nice and warm in there in the day, and in the evening she can come into the living room to keep warm. The cats don’t bother her at all - a cursory glance is all she seems to get.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 15th, 2008 at 10:38 pm and is filed under hens. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.