A long day

The blunt of it - it involved bringing Zuri to the vet and get him into a collar with a bandage on one foot.

But why?

This all started last Wednesday after work when the Boy was in the birdroom with the littles while I had Léa out with me in the living room.

The way he remembers things happening, he had turned his back to Zuri while he had Petey on his shoulder to move Joey off of something. Zuri decided to take that opportunity to try and knock Petey off the Boy's shoulder. They locked together as they fell but apparently separated the moment they got to the ground. As we were putting the birds in for dinner, the Boy asked me to check up on Zuri's foot. It looked mostly fine, although there was what appeared like a scratch on the inside of one of his front toes. While he kept his foot up right that moment, the moment I put his dinner bowl in his cage, he was using the foot fine. There was no bleeding and no swelling. That evening, he acted perfectly normal.

As he did on Thursday and Friday.

Then on Saturday, he started bringing the what would be injured toe to his beak from time to time. We noticed that the skin around the nail, which was further down from the scratch/bite sustained on Wednesday, was red. Not bleeding, but red. It looked like he was removing some dead skin. We kept a close watch on him and when he tried to lift his foot to his beak, would deter him. In fact, he got his fair share of head scritches as he wouldn't do anything if I was scratching his head.

On Sunday things looked about the same. I figured I'd bring him to the vet on Monday to clear my head, just in case. He would act perfectly normal most of the time and even put his full weight on his "injured" foot.

So all was mostly well until this morning.

When the boy took him out of his cage, for the first time, we noticed that for the first time, he had made himself bleed. So we applied cayenne to the wound and I managed to keep his mind off his toe during the morning out time. I was just waiting for the vet office to open to call in and make an emergency appointment.

I had to go to work and the Boy was going to go to the vet with him. To make things easier, we figured we'd put him right away in the Kings Cage travel cage. I was dreading the task as Zuri doesn't particularly like being put in carriers/smaller cages. But he was so good, I had him on a perch, brought the perch to my chest and managed to pick him up that way, thing I had managed to do earlier when we had to apply the cayenne paste to the wound. And he let me do it - he scarcely lets that happen. I told him how proud I was of him.

The appointment I managed to get was at 11:30 in the morning. The Boy said that he had to constantly get Zuri to stop trying to pick at his toe - this is the most he's ever tried to do so since Wednesday. And by the time they got to the vet, he had managed to chew off quite a large portion of his nail (which was intact when I left in the morning).

The vet put him in a collar and put a bandage on his foot. She wanted to keep him for a few hours to observe how he was going to behave with the collar. After I was done with work, the Boy picked me up and to the vet we went. Once there, she told us that she had shorten the collar from what she had originally done since he kept getting his foot stuck in it. She said that he would flip on his back but was always able to flip back up on his own. She did say that the toe will be fine once it heels. She also agreed that this new injury was linked to the old one - while I thought that maybe a nerve had been touched and made his toe feel weird, she said it could be that or there might have been a blockage as a result of the injury, that would have had the same effect (making his toe feel numb or tingly). We paid and left.

Once home, I took him out and cuddled with him, scratching his head while he sat on my hand. I don't think I ever got to cuddle him so closely. Things were looking somewhat up at that point.

And then everything came crashing down.

I put him back in the cage so I could prepare dinner. I wanted to give him a chance to eat as well. At one point I came back out of the kitchen to check on him and found him on his back - stuck. I hurried to help him back up and started to panic internally - what if this happen while I'm at work?

I got the Boy to check on him more frequently and eventually went back myself. His bandage looked all bloodied - again, panic set in. I got him out and it turns out he had walked in his water bowl and I'm assuming the dried up blood came through because of the new moisture. However, after I put him back in his cage, he flipped on his back and got his beak to touch his bandaged foot. Got him standing upright once again and got the Boy to keep a constant eye on him while I finished dinner. Dinner that, in the end, I could not bring myself to eat. I was (is) too stressed and the food wouldn't go down. So I took him back in my arms to cuddle some more.

As of now, he's in a smaller cage still, a tiny travel cage, for the night. With little space to flip himself on the back, every time we've checked up on him he was standing on one of the bowls, getting ready to sleep.

I only hope he calms down and gets used to things, I know he's frustrated and is just trying to take some anger out. I'll try to give him stuff to chew at his level, so he doesn't need to topple over, and hope that it will help him out. Otherwise, I might become a nervous wreck.