# What a Scare: Bacterial Infection



## Dave & Tito (Aug 1, 2010)

Hi Bird Lovers

I just wish to share my relief, and to encourage you all to watch your birds closely after I nearly lost mine.

Just over a week ago I had the day off work. Tito was his usual self, singing and happy, I had noticed no changes in his behaviour that week. At 10:00am I let him nibble the dry crust of my toast which I don't often do. 1/2 hour later, he vomited (you can tell the difference between regurgitation and vomiting when you see it).

In my head, I blamed the toast and felt terrible. I decided to watch him closely for the next few hours. At 2:00pm I offered him seeds, and he ignored them and started dozing. I called the vet and she asked me to bring him in.

During the car ride he passed a few droppings very different to those he'd done earlier, they were black, like tar.

To cut a long story short, it turns out that Tito was succumbing to a bacterial infection in his gut, and fast. I was told to leave him there for three days and to prepare for any outcome including death. Without treatment, he probably wouldn't have lived through the night.

He's home now, and for the last 5 days I have been dropper-feeding him anti-fungals and anti-bacterials twice per day. He doesn't enjoy that, but luckily there are no hard feelings between us when that's done, he still wants to hang out with me.

If I had gone to work that day I wouldn't have returned until 7pm, too late to take him to the vets. If his condition deteriorated so rapidly from 10:00am - 2:00pm, I dread to think what I may have come home to.

The Vet says it's too hard to say where he picked it up, but to continue practicing good hygiene in regards to bird care.

TIP FOR US ALL: Weigh our birds! The vet weighed Tito and he was underweight. I couldn't notice it visibly, but scales would have showed his dropping weight in the week prior. This would have alerted me to the illness earlier. By sheer CHANCE, I was home. 

I now have a neat little set of digital scales and I'll weigh him every 2 days.

I love Tito so much, he means the world to me and I am so thankful to have received a scare and not to have lost him.


----------



## MeanneyFids (Aug 24, 2010)

thats very scary  im glad hes getting better  i weigh my birds frequently with a cruddy scale... but i rely on the keel bone check. tsuka's gained while dally's lost... hmmmm... i know what the problem is though lol. tsuka bullys dally away from the food a lot of days and eats a lot of it (i have 2 bowls of food in the cage too)
that'd be so scary to lose him im glad you were home... hope he gets well soon!


----------



## Dave & Tito (Aug 1, 2010)

Thanks! 
He's coming along well, after two nights at home I began to see the old Tito coming back. He's nearly fully recovered but we have three more days of meds.
I'll have to try that keel-bone check, too!


----------



## MeanneyFids (Aug 24, 2010)

theres a sticky on it in health i think


----------



## Renae (Feb 9, 2008)

Poor little guy! Hope he makes a speedy recovery.

Theo, one of my Cockatiels, had to be rushed to the Avian Vet last year due to a bacterial infection. She was vomiting everywhere, she kept vomiting and vomiting, it was so scary, I thought I was going to lose her. She also lost so much weight, before she got sick, she was 114grams, she went down to something like 50-60 grams I think it was, and her keel bone was sticking right out.. it took awhile for her to put the weight back on. She hasn’t been sick again since then, thankfully, but I never knew how serious a bacterial infection could be.


----------



## roxy culver (May 27, 2010)

I'm so glad he's getting better...I was really scared when I started reading your thread. I weigh mine every week and do the keelbone check just about everyday (they get really annoyed with me when I do it.) Its so great you caught it just in time!


----------



## lperry82 (Aug 2, 2010)

Im so glad he is alright now  I will weigh my tiels today


----------



## .mpeg (Oct 6, 2010)

this is the reason i still weigh mister every day. i can't check his keelbone with my fingers, he won't let me.. i can do it with my nose/lips though. not as good but he maintains his weight so it's something i guess.
i'd only had mister about a week, 6 weeks old, when i rushed him to the vet with a bad bacterial infection. bit of diarrhoea, bit of sluggishness. that was it. literally. few more days i would've lost him. it's terrifying. the couple of months that it took for recovery (the antibios gave him a yeast infection and it took a couple of months of treating one then the other then both and then just trying a probiotic and that wasn't good enough so back on treating both.. and after all that he got a parasite! so had to treat that plus a preventative antifungal..)
anyway. couple of months of recovery later he's just under 80g and permanently on the probiotic because i'm terrified of him going down again so quickly.. missed out on a lot of growth, poor boy. he's almost 8 months old though now. getting all hormonal, the brat.


----------



## Dave & Tito (Aug 1, 2010)

That's a sad story but I think it's great you have gone to such lengths for him. I hope he does well!
Tito is doing ok. His droppings look good and he has put on a tiny bit of weight, we're back to the vets next week for a check up. We stop giving him medication tomorrow. He is closer to his old self but not 100 percent the same, just a little but quieter than he was. I think he is definitely still recovering. 

I am just pleased that after a week of force feeding him medication he is so forgiving and we're still good friends!


----------



## .mpeg (Oct 6, 2010)

lol yep it cost a good ten times what i bought him for. credit to mister though, he spent his recovery time fledging 
tito will keep loving you, don't worry. i had to hold mister with his back against my chest and force his beak open for his medicine and he still loves me lol
tito will be recovering for a while i think. have you got any apple cider vinegar? that's what i use as a probiotic. 1mL in 250mL of water. just give that as his drinking water. that's what the vet told me to do. will help rebuild his immune system because the systemic antibiotics will have demolished it, if he's anything like mister.


----------



## calex89 (Oct 28, 2010)

my whitefaced hen had the same thing when i just bought her. she was up and down for weeks before a full recovery. im glad you got it sorted  he is very beautiful


----------

