ippuku abisensei🍵🐔👘

CONTENT WARNING: More gross things that came from the inside of a chicken.

Oh Misty.

Where do I even begin?

Misty has been a special bird from the moment we brought her home as a chick.

She was a day or two older than the other chickens, so at first she was the boss. Then Chi-chan became larger in both personality and girth and Misty hasn’t truly recovered since.

When she first started laying eggs at six months old, she got sick. Really sick. Like she couldn’t walk and we had to give her vitamins and physical therapy sick. Initially we thought it might be from her eating a screw and the metal poisoning from that. Turns out she was being bullied off of the food and water by the other members of the flock, and so she went to chicken boarding school with our amazing friends who roomed her with two gentle elder silkies.

She thrived and spent nearly a year at chicken boarding school, and was able to walk again after a few months and some calcium supplements. She also survived a bear attack during that time. The bear ripped apart her run in the middle of the night looking for a meal, but her coop was built very sturdy and the beast couldn’t get her or her roommates. My friend found her out of the coop and wandering around the yard looking for bugs the next morning.

Oh Misty.

As the year went on, her senior silkie friends began passing away one by one, until she was alone. Since she was able to walk, she came back to us and we very, very slowly integrated her back into the flock. It took several months, but we managed to successfully get her back into the fold with minimal bullying.

Through all of this, she continued to lay eggs daily like chickens have been bred for hundreds of years to do.

But in late spring 2026, Misty began laying some wonky eggs.

Like some parts normal, some parts paper thin. Some bean-shaped and wrinkly, some not.

As of writing this article, she has been to the vet or pet ER no less than four times for egg-related blockages in 2026, and this past Saturday was no exception.

Misty is also currently molting, and her egg-laying machine of a body does not know how to balance out egg production to focus on regrowing her feathers, so recently her egg shells have been very thin. So thin that they collapse inside of her form the pressure of being in her oviduct and get stuck.

So I or the vet have to glove up and lube up to get them out.

I have had to stick my fingers in poor Misty’s rear end more times in the past month than I’d like to admit.

And Saturday night the collapsed egg was too far up her oviduct for me to reach, so we packed her up and went to the emergency vet.

Unfortunately when things get stuck up there, the risk for infection and death also goes up and it becomes a bit of a ticking time bomb. But luckily the veterinary staff were familiar with Misty’s case and took really good care of her.

The vet was not only able to pull out the stuck collapsed egg, but took an X-ray to make sure that she didn’t miss any pieces.

And boy were we surprised.

Misty had eaten another fucking screw.

Just months after we had confirmed the other one had been passed through her system.

Goddamnit Misty.

So as I’m sitting here typing this, she has a small screw floating around in her gizzard like a shiny pointy food processor. Neat.

Hopefully she will poop this one out too.

Right now, Misty is in a hamster cage in the living room recuperating from the whole ordeal. The past day or so she hasn’t been able to walk as well as she has been, an eerie recurrence of when she initially got sick two years ago. We still aren’t 100% sure why she got sick to begin with – was it the bullying? The screw? Bad genetics leading to overlaying eggs? A nutrition deficiency? We aren’t sure. But we do know that we will continue to throw spaghetti at the wall until we find a regimen that sticks and keeps her happy and healthy.