Bleeding Leg

User Question
First off I love this site. It has helped me a lot and I wanted to contribute a little if I could.

I was reading the other questions in this are and I saw the one where someone had a bird whose leg was bleeding.

There is a good chance that the bird was on the cage and the other bird pulled it off the side, or landed on it hard, or something along that line.

This type of accident recently happened to the parakeet that my daughter recently gave me for Christmas. This was the happiest bird I had ever seen. She loved to play with me and would repeat sounds back to me in just a couple of days.

I only had a small cage and had put it up high where I thought it was safe...it wasn't. My cat jumped up, not trying to get the bird but to sleep behind the cage and knocked the cage off the shelf.

Poor Tweety, the name my daughter gave her and I see no reason to change it :)...had a rough ride. I saw her trying to hang on the the side of the cage and when it hit the desk below she hurt her foot badly.

She was bleeding from the top of the leg and the middle of her claw.

I called the vet and he said there really wasn't a lot to do for her as long as I didn't see any bone sticking out or the like. He told me the best thing to do for the night was to make sure the bleeding stopped, as you suggested, and to clean the cage and dab peroxide on the wounds with a Q-tip making sure that it was dry before I let the bird be able to get at the area.

The next day I took poor Tweety in and the vet said that the leg was actually dislocated and the claw looked to have nerve damage. He said that the leg had popped out and back in so that looked ok and that all we could do was to wait and see about the claw.

Tweety is happy again. Plays with her toys and makes noises with me. It has been about two weeks and I was afraid that she would never really recover, but she has. She does have a bit of a limp, but has learned new ways to get around.She has even been able to hang upside down and ring her little bell...one of her favorite tricks. She only does it for a minute or two, not like before when she would spend an hour upside down at times, but she is playing and that has made me happy.

Sorry this was so long, but I wanted to go into a little details just in case the same happens to someone else out there reading your site.

Lisa's Answer
Yikes, I would really look into seeing if there are any other vets around in your area. It sounds extremely odd that your keet had a bleeding injury and your vet didn't say "bring him in". If I called my vet up with an injured bird like that, I'd be over there in 15 minutes. That's what being an animal doctor is all about ...

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