Today I was the mean lady who took Sam & Lily to the vet’s office for a check-up.

sam
Sam was not impressed. He seemed a little hurt that I would betray him by letting strangers ruffle his feathers. He is a big lug of a duck, even though he is underweight.

lily
Lily is a biter duck, so she didn’t take any $#!% from the vet today. She is way too thin, but gaining weight.

Both of them are doing okay, but not great. One of them… I think Lily… has some blood in her feces. We’ll get back some test results on Saturday, which will show if they have an infection. They had a negative fecal test today, which hopefully means the parasite medicine worked.

Unfortunately, Jane’s necropsy showed really, really bad stuff. So the vet is worried that she may have had a contagious disease. Because of that, Sam & Lily are still in quarantine and can’t play outside or be around other animals.

Jane’s necropsy showed she had:

– severe, extensive yellow fibrin protein all over inside her
– pericardia sac infection, with adhesion – heart sac was filled with gelatin-like fibrin
– hugely enlarged spleen – enormous
– damaged liver
– septic arthritis
– she was emaciated (starving)

There was no chance she’d survive unfortunately, but we couldn’t have known that until the necropsy.

I was hoping the vet visit would go better and that Sam & Lily would be pronounced healthy so they could go into the yard with my own ducks while they finish their recovery. But until we know more about how Jane got so sick, they’ll have to stay in quarantine. The vets said they’d never seen a heart look like that before, with gelatin around it.

Just a note: I am not a vet, so my vet explanations sometimes get a little jumbled. Please don’t take the description above to be word-for-word what the vet said. She used the right terms and said it intelligently. This is my lay-person interpretation of it. Also, I originally got the parasite written down wrong last week – the ducks had capillaria, not cryptosporidiosis.

Sam & Lily look so much better off than Jane did… I sure hope they don’t have a contagious disease. They were both very good kids at the vet today, and they look out for each other. Sam gets upset if he can’t see Lily, and I know he stuck by Jane ’til the very end.

Thank you again for everyone who has donated to help these ducks this week. You have really made a difference in the quality of care they received, and I could not be more grateful.