Can I ask? What happened to Oliver??
Jim
Oliver had been unwell for many years. When I met him, in 2006, he had already been scoped, operated on, and treated with drugs for asper. He kept testing positive for it off and on. But he seemed extremely healthy. He began to develop granulomas in his nostrils - nares? which would get flushed out regularly at the vet's. At some point, we moved and he was seeing a different vet. This vet - well, the assistant - traumatized him so badly flushing out his sinus one time - he was crying, an agonizing terrible sound, and we sat through it because we figure the vet knew what they were doing and he needed it flushed out, it was getting plugged up. It took him a couple of days to get over that, sitting huddled in cage looking pitiful. It began to seem that whatever he had was being tolerated well, and going to the vet was hurting him, so for a long time he didn't go to the vet.
This sounds terrible and it is. It was a judgement call on the part of his person: that he did worse every time he saw the vet and seemed to be fine apart from his nose getting plugged up. I didn't feel it was my place to insist. The one nostril got very plugged up, completely blocked, and after a long time he began to have swelling and fluid coming from his nose and eye. So finally he did go back to the original vet, the avian specialist, the one who had been telling us all along that Oliver was sick. He was kind, considering. He had to put Oliver out to surgically remove the granuloma in his nostril. He tested him for the old diseases and found he had pseudomonas and I forget what .. he went on several courses of antibiotics that made him sick and we worried about his kidneys failing. One strain of infection would get knocked out and then another would turn out to be resistant.
Problem was, Oliver didn't look sick. He was feisty as all get out. But the vet showed me the mass in his upper mandible, and at one point the infection ate through the divider between one side of the beak and the other. He said, the infection is destroying the bone in his head, and when it gets through to his brain he will die. I won't forget him sitting and staring at Oliver with his head in his hands, saying I'm just trying to figure out how to save this bird. But it was too late.
Birds have cavities in their little bodies, air spaces, that aren't being constantly bathed in fluid and air exchanges as our bodies are. So there are places where an infection, bacterial or fungal, can take root and grow and be very difficult to eradicate. What good is putting antibiotics in the bloodstream if they don't make it to the source of the infection? I gave Oliver injected antibiotics, maybe twice a day, and he began to show signs of kidney failure. Again, not my call: it was a choice between killing him by kidney failure or letting him live out a shortened life with an infection that he seemed to tolerate. Of course that was an illusion. Birds hide their illnesses.
I'm telling you this long story because it's deadly serious. If a bird tests sick, even if it looks healthy, ask for the test to be repeated if you don't trust it, but then get the bird any medical attention possible. We tried so hard with Oliver - he had a little gas chamber for nebulized drugs, we figured out how to hide Baytril in something tasty, he got drops, pills, injections, sinus flushes ... thousands of dollars in treatment over decades. I honestly don't think we could have done anything to cure him. He had a drug resistant infection in an inaccessible part of his little body, and probably all we could do was buy him time. We bought him as much time as we could. We came home one afternoon this early May, on a nice day, and he was sitting on the floor of the cage panting. His person picked him up and held him, and not five minutes later he gave a last few hoarse gasps and died.
All you guys, most of you, have had birds a lot longer than me and have been through the pain of losing them. So I'm not telling you anything new and I'm sorry if this causes anyone pain. I'm saying all this to reach the one person out there who may find themselves in the same situation: your bird doesn't look sick, so you don't take him to the vet every year for a checkup, or if he gets sick. And maybe you don't have access to good veterinary care. But I beg you, learn what a sick bird looks like, learn how to set up a hospital box/cage, learn where the good avian vets in your area can be found, learn some basic bird first aid. There seem to be lots of great posts on this site and others that will help you learn to recognize illness in a bird, and maybe you can save your bird and have him with you for many years. Oliver was here for only 25 years, that's nothing for an Amazon, and I keep wondering if we could have done anything different that would have made a difference. But sometimes things are not in our power, and all you can do is grieve the loss, learn what you can, and work a little harder to love the rest of the creatures you encounter in your life.
:smile016::smile016::smile016::smile016:
