Well, I honestly can’t remember if I’ve written about Hector’s vet trips recently, so a brief recap. A couple of months ago, I realized that Hector was drinking more water than usual for her. Hector’s vet was about an hour drive away, so to be honest, she hadn’t been in a long time. It was such a traumatic thing to put her in the car for an hour, deal with the vet, and then have another hour drive back home. Have I mentioned that Hector gets carsick?
The people that adopted one of my foster parrots, recently told me about an avian vet they used that was close to me. Between the excess drinking, and the long time without a check up, I decided to try out the new vet, and he’s awesome!
So Hector went to the vet about 2 months ago. We did an extensive (and expensive) blood work up to get some base lines and figure out what was going on. Overall the blood work looked pretty good for an older lady, but the vet was concerned about her drinking too much.
We started a new diet, low carb, high veggie, low fruit, no seeds, very limited nuts, and plenty of healthy pellets. Hector likes Fruit Zupreem pellets. She went back about a month ago for a weight check, and the vet was happy where she was at.
Today we went back again. Let me tell you that Hector knew what was coming as soon as she saw the cat carrier. I don’t know why, because the cat carrier comes out all the time and doesn’t usually affect her, but she knew.
I had to towel her to get her in the cage. Not the best way to start the journey, but she had to go. She threw up in the carrier on the way. This is the second time this happened and I even made a point of not feeding her breakfast this morning, but apparently it didn’t matter.
The vet said her weight was good and remained stable which is great. I was worried she hasn’t been eating enough, but apparently she is doing just fine. We talked about taking her to a specialist in Boston, but that would be expensive and stressful. The other option was another poop test which he would send out to a bird specialist he knew with better lab equipment. We just needed a sample.
Hector was sitting on a perch on a scale in the vet office clearly listening to everything we were saying. When we were done chatting and she still hadn’t pooped, the vet suggested I bring home a tube and pipette to collect a sample myself. I told the vet I wasn’t in a huge rush and I was happy to wait in the office a little longer to see if she would poop and just make it easy.
Well, as soon as I mentioned waiting around in the vet office, Hector made us a giant poop! The vet was able to collect enough of it to test, and we could head home. I swear she knew she had to poop to get out of there!
For now, she stays on her special diet. I have a feeling this is her new diet for life, but we are managing. We’ll see what the test results are when they come back in the next week to ten days.
The vet thinks she may have renal issues, hence the special diet. Hoping the test results don’t show anything too serious! Anyone have any experience with birds with renal issues? Let me know!