We Got Bumble...and I Don't mean Bees!

I SWEAR Jess assured me that chickens were very low maintenance.  Maybe I heard wrong.  So far, I had two roosters, one death, colds, and now Bumble Foot.  The other day (it's been a while because I'm VERY behind on my blogging) I was feeding the girls left-over lettuce and I noticed Miss Kitty had a strange bump on her foot. 

See the bump?

I called Jess and he didn't know what it was so I went online.  Apparently chickens need soft surfaces to walk on, and my apocalyptic backyard isn't quite cutting it.  I say that because I can't even get grass to grow so my yard is half dirt and half mulch with a sprinkling of plants in cages (it's a learning process).  The chickens terrorize anything growing.  Sometimes they don't even eat the plants.  They just pluck all of the leaves off.

Anyway, I found on a chicken forum that it's called Bumble Foot.  It occurs when a chicken gets a cut on their foot (probably from scratching in mulch) and then the wound is compacted by walking on hard surfaces (my clay dirt back yard) and then Staph infection sets in.  The infection itself, which you will see momentarily, looks like a thick cheese.  Yummy, eh?  It gets better.  You have to pull out the "plug" in order to pull out the cheesy pus.  The blogs/forums that I found said you needed to take an exacto knife and cut around the area in order to get all of the infection out.  Then you wrap it with sports wrap.  This sounded like a job for MOM.  She's such a great sport.  Basically, I did all the holding and mom did all the dirty work.
 

After the plug was pulled

Digging for Gold

End of Surgery

Miss Kitty's new shoes!

It was only AFTER we cut poor Kitty's foot open that I read more blogs that said soaking the foot and spraying it with antibacterial stuff would do the trick as well.  Miss Kitty took one for the team.  She was our guinea pig.  I'm sure Jane and Pearl thank her because now THEY HAVE IT TOO!  Evidently it's common and you are supposed to check the chickens' feet often...who knew?  Just so you know, it takes about an hour every couple of days to treat my working girls.  (Insert joke about Prostitutes and infections here...mine just aren't appropriate. ha!)  Their feet are getting better.  I think in about a week we will be BUMBLE FREE!!

Hope you're not having anything cheesy for dinner tonight!