Wednesday

I come home around 4:50. Saiwe looks excited to see me, then falls off his perch, head cocked at a right angle and wings flared, and doesn't move for maybe 45 seconds. When he does he can't balance or walk around and he's sleepy. Bad. I call Michele. At about 5:15 he startles at something and does it again. I start calling every emergency vet in the area. There are no avian vets available anywhere until 8 the next morning. I cover Saiwe's cage with a blanket and a coat, shut the lights off, and go into the other room.

Later that night I find out the same thing happened just before I got home, maybe at 4:35 or 4:40.

Saiwe had three grand mal seizures in the space of 45 minutes. Not Good. Really, really, really Not Good.

Thursday

Michele and I run him into the vet. He's alive, but not moving, not really responding except to fluff his head feathers; he doesn't give Michele any sass, even, and it is quite frankly terrifying. We check him in and a little later I get a call asking if they can do bloodwork and an x-ray. The cost is nasty, but otherwise they won't know what's causing the problems.

The x-ray shows up zinc and/or lead in the digestive tract. He's too small to operate on, so they start medicines and give me a rough estimate. (Not pretty). The vet seems confident, though, that he should be fine, and the lady at the counter advises me to apply for CareCredit so I don't have to pay in one lump sum. I send in the application... and wait.

Friday

I get a call telling me Saiwe's doing fine and asking whether or not I have results yet from CareCredit. I don't -- it's a 24-hour process. In the meantime, would I like to come visit Saiwe? Absolutely.

I go see him with Mom. He's doing a lot better, turning his head so I can get at the spots he likes best, yawning, stretching his neck out, even climbing up to my shoulder. He's still acting pretty tired, and his poop's a weird color from the medicines, but it's reassuring. At least until the lady comes back and tells me that they found some nasty bacteria in the cultures and they're sending them in so they can figure out what antibiotics to put him on.

Hopefully I get him back tomorrow; if things don't go so well it'll be Monday. We still haven't figured out exactly where the lead came from so we can prevent it from happening again, and if the CareCredit app doesn't go through I'll definitely need to find a job for the summer.

More when it's available.