Diaries of a House Chicken Part 3: Diagnosis Unknown

A very peckish and alert Poppy headed back to the vet for her parents to have one last consult with the vet before leaving her for the day. It was a rocky appointment to put it mildly between a less than pleasant vet (not one we had worked with before) and the tech accidentally referring to Poppy as Ada as she took her back to start the first few tests we had hoped would reveal something.

They didn’t.

So we okayed the X-ray to see if anything would show up that could explain the “slightly off” enzyme reading. It didn’t show anything conclusive, but after a day of waiting anxiously by the phone to get updates it did make us smile, because how can it not?

The vet did report that there were lots of small items in her gizzard that maybe could be causing a problem, but nothing looked too out of place and listed a few options for our next steps. Of the options, we picked bringing her home with an antibiotics run with hand feeding food as we kept an eye on her.

Unhappy about her return to her set up, that quickly turned tolerable when Chickie Daddy told her that she needed to take some medicine. Giving meds to a chicken is not joke (if you’re a city slicker who treats their flock like the spoiled princesses they are). Propping open a beak isn’t an easy task. Liquid meds? They sure don’t lick it up like a kitty or a pup and you run the risk of getting it down their lungs. Chickie Daddy though? He’s amazingly talented at it and has fortunately taken over most of the meds to save me from the suffering caused by it.

To give her some socializing time a little after the sun set, Poppy and I tried to watch some of Despicable Me 2, but that didn't go so well. So much for getting to the part with the guard chicken, she was too antsy and it was time to get her to bed after a long stressful day.

Sleep tight little one- we’re going to have a trying week of isolation, medication, and trying to get you back into the coop as quickly as possible.