Difficult Decisions.
I was due to go away for a weekend of voluntary committee work and on the Friday morning Beatrice was looking very weak indeed. Her tail feathers were sodden with urates (the chalky and amoniac substances that were still passing through her digestive tract) and she was still vomiting. I really didn't want to go but it was a commitment I couldn't avoid. Before I went I sat her on my lap in the sunshine after I'd bathed her again and she rallied somewhat. She ate a little live yogurt, accepted her medicines stoically and settled in the crook of my arm making sad, weak little chicken noises.
I was very upset because, to be honest I didn't really think she'd still be alive when I returned. But Bob promised to come back from the allotment midday to check on her and make sure she was drinking and eating. I left her swaying slightly on one leg by the water dispenser in the coop.
When I returned she was looking wobbly so we brought her in again to sleep in he box in the sitting room. The night was cold and her poor bones were barely covered by feathers as she had lost so much weight. When I came home, earlier than usual, from work she was even weaker and as I picked her up she vomited again. It became apparent that she was ravenous but every time she ate solid food she was sick and she wasn't deriving any nutrition from the food she tried to eat.
I rang Mandy at All Creatures Vetinary Surgery and she got Erica the vet to call us back. We talked a little and I told her that, subject to Erica's examination, I felt our poor little hen was dying and it wasn't kind or fair to keep squeezing antibiotics into her and tempting her with food she couldn't digest. So I sat in the sun with her until Bob came back from the allotment and tried very hard not to cry. I failed and when Bob returned we put the poor soul into the cat basket and once more took the bus to Radcliffe.
There is something surreal about taking life and death decisions when the weather is warm and the sun is shining. It feels incongruous and as we walked up the road from the bus stop with our little bundle it had an air of unreality. I should mention here that there are women who can somehow manage to cry in a sweet delicate manner, crystal tears rolling fatly down their flushed cheeks displaying their grief without unduely disturbing their makeup. I am not one of those women.
By the time we got to the surgery I looked like I'd been punched several times and the bundle of kitchen roll in my handbag was sodden. Erica took one look at me and escorted us into the examination room. We opened the cat box and Beatrice was so weak she couldn't even spread her wings. Where before she'd happily have flown across the room we had to lift her out to be examined. She had lost another 150 grams in less than a week and she continued to dribble the clear brown watery liquid from her soft crop as I held her to be examined.
To cut a sad story short we all agreed that it was kinder to put her to sleep than to allow her to slowly starve to death and so Erica injected her with a sedative and then adiministered the lethal dose. In the end her heart was fairly strong and it took a while for her to go. The vet suggested I put her down but somehow I couldn't let her go. We took her home in the cat basket which we placed in the outside refrigerator so we could finally lay her to rest the next day.
Rest In Peace Beatrice.
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