2nd opinion - X-ray GI tract hen

[cate1124]

Oh gosh, thank you for letting me know! I have been offering food and as much as she wants of it. She has been eating a tiny bit of scrambled eggs and tiny bit of her food along with a couple worms I’ve seen her dig up. I tried mashing her food with water and thought she would go for it since she wants water so much but no interest in that. I can see that she wants to eat more and will tap her beak together looking at it but will only have a few bites and about that time too is when I hear the gurgling in her crop. I know it’s definitely not enough food to actually sustain her. Today I notice a decrease in eating even more and she’s not having as much of the scrambled eggs as she was previous days.

Didn’t know that the barium turns solid. Eek. That was probably the light colored sludgy stuff I saw the first couple nights and there was a solid chalky white pebble another day

Her poops haven’t been much. Tiny bit of liquid, some white urates and little bit of greenish matter which I suspect is the bile excreted from not eating enough. Here’s a photo of one from yesterday.

When she was at the vet after the 2nd antibiotic her poops were starting to get better and other symptoms were starting to improve too and then they regressed and her crop kept refilling on them (again) and they couldn’t figure out where the fluid in the crop was coming from and so they tried for days and days with various tube feeding amounts/ formulas and pulled fluid out of crop multiple times, crop flushes, withhold water etc because she will regurgitate when it gets too full. So I’ve been scared to let her get much water as her crop already had fluid in it the night I brought her home last week after the barium study. I’m scared to fill her crop as I wouldn’t know what to do but also scared I’m not giving her nearly enough and not sure how much actually get through Like a catch 22. Any idea how much water they need each day? Or any suggestions what to do?

My best advice would be to let her self-regulate. What's happening in their bodies is always somewhat obscured to us, and she's the best expert you have. My hen with heart failure kept drinking quite a bit right until the end, though she was too nauseated to eat. (She would approach food and do that beak smacking you describe, but then not eat.) When she died, quite a bit of foul-smelling fluid drained from her beak, but ... she was dying and I wanted to just follow her lead. Sometimes, that's all we can do.

"It can feel very isolating not knowing what to do or not do for one you love and is under your care." This is so true, especially because many people don't appreciate chickens nor the bonds we form with them. Please know that those of us here understand. Especially with the hens we have reared from chicks, we feel a responsibility to do all we can to treat illness if we can, and then to let them go with as little suffering as possible if we cannot.