A Nursing Career

'It's a good job,' I say, 'that I'm not in work that requires me to be away from home for nine hours every day.'

I am talking to Mrs Poo. Mrs Poo is sitting on my lap. She is quite comfy. She is even dozing a little. She looks like a little old lady who has fallen asleep on a bus, all hunched up beneath a woolly shawl.

I am nursing Mrs Poo. My equipment is a tiny 1 ml syringe and a dish of sugar water. I am rehydrating a chicken. It is a time consuming business. Can you imagine the calamity if I was in outside employment?

'I've brought my dehydrated chicken to work with me today. I'll be spending 40 minutes of each hour drip feeding her, and the other twenty minutes working. That's okay, isn't it?'

Cor, she doesn't like moulting, does Mrs Poo. Also, she has caught a chill. From standing out in the rain on Monday. Stupid thing. I kept yelling out of the back door, 'Mrs Poo, get under the tree. Go into the pod. For heaven's sake, do something to get out of the rain.' The other three girls were sheltering. But I suppose the nature of Poo is that she will buck a trend every which way she can, even if it means dicing with potential death (or a nasty chill at least).

So coupled with a sudden drop in featherage, the chill has meant Mrs Poo is undergoing indoor convalescence in the cage that was the Pumphrey Wing aka the Miggins Ward aka the Slocombe psychiatric unit aka the Pandora Kitten quarantine bay aka the Rubba Duck Foster Home.

'What shall we call it now?' I say to Mrs Poo, as I set up the nest and food and water.
'How about the Mrs Polovitska Memorial Nursing Home?' she says.
'Oh come on,' I say, 'it's only a chill and a moult.'
'You can put that on my gravestone when I'm dead,' says Poo.

And then I spend all night worrying I'm going to find a dead chicken in my writing room come the morning.

Luckily, Mrs Poo is alive when I can finally bear the suspense no longer and venture downstairs. She has eaten a bit of lettuce but my main concern is making sure she gets enough fluids. I am very keen on fluids. Ask Andy or Chris or Heather. If they are ever ill, my cure-all is 'Drink lots of water.'

'I've got a really bad cold, Mum.'
'Drink lots of water! Lots and lots.'

'I've got a headache, Denise.'
'That's because you aren't drinking enough water. Have a glass every hour.'

'Mum, my leg's just dropped off.'
'Have a drink of water. You'll soon grow a new one.'

Anyway, trying to get a chicken to drink water when they have beaks like vices requires the use of cunning trickery. After much loitering about chicken chat forums I discovered such a trick, which I employed very well the last time Mrs Poo has hospitalised, just as she was coming into lay and going all moody.

What you do is drop water at the top of your ailing hen's beak. The water will slide down the beak and gather at the tip, hanging off the end in a droplet (much like a dewdrop hanging off an old geezer's nose on a cold winter's day).

And the hen, sensing the drop of water, will open their beak and suck it in!

Magic!

Sometimes they flick their beak and you'll get a splat of water in the eye, but mostly, they'll drink what's hanging from the end of their beak. I hope old geezers don't do this with their dew drops.

I need to get 50 of these water filled syringes down her every day. So every couple of hours, I'm hoiking her out of the cage and doing the squirt, drip, drop, suck technique at least 10 times.

Of course, I am worried about Mrs Poo dying. Although she doesn't feel so hot this morning, chickens are untimately fragile creatures who can go from peak of health to dead in a matter of hours.

And whilst Mrs Poo is a vicious, recalcitrant, bossy thug, she is our vicious, recalcitrant, bossy thug and we love her.