Hello from Boston

[Pajarita]

Why do you have to clean her bottom? Is her poop so liquidy?

[Navre]

Because she can't perch or even really walk. She tends to drag herself through her poop.

She has pressure sores on her feet and I have to keep them clean.

[Pajarita]

Have you tried putting the liquid bandage on the bottom of her feet?

[Navre]

I'll look into that.

Tanya is going back to the vet tomorrow morning. I'll ask about it.

[Navre]

Was at the vet with Tanya again today. Took blood for cholesterol, blood for TB test, cloaca swab. I guess these tests get sent out, so may take a while to come back.

Her cholesterol was way up, over 600, so we are breaking it down into componants to determine the right drug to use.

The TB test is because the TB skin legions can look like lipomas. If the test comes back positive, she won't have to bother putting the bird through a biopsy. If it comes back negative she still might. I guess false negatives are common. I think the TB tests are mostly to rule that out.

Bile acid was improved slightly from June, but still high.

[Pajarita]

Ouch on the cholesterol!!! What was she eating at her foster home that raised it so much? Because, according to what the lady said on the links you gave us, her diet was better than what she used to getting so it makes no sense that it got so high -unless it was the free-feeding of the pellets that did it but, as much as I dislike pellets, I doubt this was the cause. Yes, you will need to find out for sure how much is the good and how much the bad cholesterol but, in any case, it's still super high.
Personally, I don't like to give birds human medicines when the origin of the problem is dietary (things like fatty liver, high uric acid, high cholesterol, etc)... there aren't any studies done so doctors don't know what the long term effect can be or even the right dosages and that worries me. I would much rather do things the natural way even if it goes slower - but that's me.

After your comment that you had to clean her feet because of the sores, I was also wondering about that because pressure sores don't take THAT long to heal. I mean, once you remove the cause, feed a good diet (lots of vit E and A) and provide a 'barrier' for irritation (the soft material for her to stand on), it's a matter of days before the sores are closed and a couple of weeks for them to be completely cured... so something else is going on there. But, if you ask me (and this does not in any way disagree with the doctor doing the TB test, mind you, if, for nothing else, the fact that avian tuberculosis is a zoonotic disease and you can catch it!), the likely cause is lack of vitamins. As far as I know, avian TB symptoms are weight loss, depression and, sometimes, even labored breathing and she doesn't have any of these, right?

[Navre]

It could be that she is reabsorbing the limpomas, and that is boosting her cholesterol? I know that humans losing weight often see a spike in cholesterol. She said that sometimes a hen can spike cholesterol when she is getting hormonal, and going to a new home with a male owner made it something she had to consider, but she didn't see anything else to indicate that Tanya was at all hormonal.

She gets so little in the way of pellets. She eats less than 2 TBS a day. Most of her diet is the gloop. The pellets are Harrisons low fat. The 3% fat is a minimum, so who knows what's actually in it. I do plan to give her more oats. She said she could have oatmeal at room temperature.

As far as the pro-biotic goes, she said it's really not something she usually recommends, as it's all human based, but that if we had seen good results from it that it wouldn't hurt to continue.

She said to continue the Milk thistle/Dandilion extract. She agreed that it was better on the food, both for less stress and for better absorption. She said that it was "just about proven" effective with birds, and there was a ton of anecdotal evidence. She said to hold off on Aloe right now. She said that she hadn't seen much proven, and she didn't want to be adding and changing a bunch of things at once.

I meant to ask about adding a multivitamin.

She did warn about the TB, and she wore a mask the whole time she was examining Tanya, but she did say that even if it was TB, it doesn't necessarily spread like human TB because it's not usually in the lungs but in the skin or the GI tract. She said that the high cholesterol actually made a GI TB less likely

She said if the TB test comes back negative, she will have to biopsy one of the "limpomas" to confirm the negative diagnosis. If it's positive there would be no need to put the bird through the biopsy. It could take up to two weeks to get the TB test back. I did point out that Tanya had been living with 4 other birds who showed no signs, put she said that it was not always easily spread and that would not be uncommon. She said that limpomas make sense given everything else, but there is no way to tell without doing these tests, and it's something we absolutely have to know.

Tanya is getting a few pin feathers on her head. That's a good sign, as it means something is working, at least a bit.

[Navre]

I just took a good look at her feet. There aren't any open sores, but there are spots that look a little pink, or raw.

[Wolf]

Most multivitamins are not worth spending the money on and even in humans don't have much benefit with most of the time the exception is C and D and the fat soluable ones in the multivitamin can be harmful. Now I did not keep the document that I read this in, but it was about multivitamins in humans and not birds.

[Navre]

The only reason I want to ask about them was that the answer about vitamins is usually something along the lines of, "the pellets have everything the bird needs."

She's not really eating much in the way of pellets.