So our patient today is Omeka, she's one of our North Island brown kiwi and she
actually lives in the Night Forest.
Omeka is 39 years old, she's actually a really old lady when it comes to kiwis,
she's been found by the keepers collapsed in the aviary this morning.
They brought her up to us and we've been trying to work through what's been going on.
So it was really apparent right from the start that this was a critically ill
kiwi, she was just lying there, we were able to look at her, we were able to
get blood off of her. She was struggling a bit to breathe initially, so we got her
into an incubator and into our critical care unit.
To just let her stabilize for a couple of hours, later that afternoon, we managed to
get an X-ray off of her and that showed us the reason for what's going on, is
that she has an egg in her that's not passed and not progressing properly.
So an egg-bound - we call them an egg-bound bird, an egg-bound bird is a critically ill bird.
It's a particularly dangerous position for a kiwi to be in because their eggs are so
large, they take up a huge amount of their body space so that puts pressure on
all the other organs and on the rest of her body. So we need to get that egg out of her.
So the plan from here is to give her a little bit longer, just in
the incubator, nice and warm, with some calcium and with some hormones on board
to help her pass the egg. If she doesn't progress throughout the day and she
doesn't look like she's going to be able to lay this egg on her own, then we're
gonna need to look at being able to take her to surgery and taking the egg out surgically.
So this is the egg that we just took out of the kiwi, we're just having a really
close look at it and you can actually see there's an indent in the surface of the
shell so if it had broken inside of her that can lead to all sorts of
complications as far as infection and damage to the inside of the uterus so
really good that it's all come out in one piece.
She's most definitely not out of the woods yet so she still needs to wake up
from this anesthetic and then her body needs to recover from this process that
it's been through and then she needs to do those things like being able to eat
and be a normal kiwi so definitely not safe yet but on the right track hopefully.
This is day two, post surgery with Omeka. So she's still a critically ill patient.
but today's as good as we could possibly hope for.
So normally Kiwis lay two eggs in a clutch, and a few weeks apart, so today
part of the treatment is giving her a contraceptive implant and so this will
shut down her ovary, stop her trying to form another egg for six or even 12 months
and just give everything a real rest while it heals.
I'm just going to use a little bit of surgical glue, just to close the site where the needle went.
Yeah so I can feel that implants nicely in place.
The next hurdles are, in about a week, we know the insides hopefully are healing
well and then it'll be about another two weeks until the muscles and the skin and
everything are healed and then if we're going great in two or three weeks
then we know we've fixed her but we're certainly not at that stage yet.
That's where she had the surgery, you could still see the scar, but that's all
really together, no abnormal swelling at all. Omeka is doing really really well
and she had really, a lot of serious problems to get over, but she's done
really well. So we're about a month post-surgery now and she's every day
done better and better and now we think she's totally fixed
So the process from here is she's going to be reintegrated slowly with her partner.