by Pajarita » Mon Mar 28, 2022 9:47 am
Oh, I believe you! I know how I feel every time one of my animals is sick so I can well imagine what you are going through. But one thing I have learned is that people (and I include myself here) don't usually realize how very resilient and pragmatic parrots are... One sees them small and so very light that it seems that a hard wind would finish them but it's not true, they are actually quite hardy. My very first rescue was a female RedLored I called Pretty Bird because she never answered to her name, Pistachio. She came to me with crooked legs and, for years, I would mention this to the vets seeing her and they all said it must have been congenital - until I moved to Pa and brought her to Dr. Jodie Santore who treated exotics and was, so far, the best avian vet I've had even though she was not board certified. When I told her about her legs, she decided to take XRays and found out that her 'congenital' defect was actually that both legs had been broken when she was a baby. One of them had healed crooked and the other one had never healed, leaving her walking on her broken bone (it was a displaced fracture) moving and rubbing inside her leg. She had to go through an operation where they shaved the ends of the two parts of the bone to align them, then she had a metal rod attached to the bone and an external fixator put on (this is when they put metal rods going into the flesh and the bone and held in place with an exterior metal frame). I had to take her to the vet every week for XRays to make sure the bone was knitting, then after 8 weeks, she had surgery again to remove the steel rod from the bone and the fixator, and her leg put into a cast which was removed weeks later. As you can see, the whole thing was INCREDIBLY stressful and painful for her but she came through like a champ.