Feeling guilty as well as sad....

[BCBG]

Bluebell was a cream legbar, bought as POL in October with my other hens. She never started laying until last weekend when I saw her with bad diarrhoea and a funny walk. Yesterday we managed to catch her and found that she had the most enormous egg stuck: it was bigger than a ducks egg and then some . I googled all the advice and we sat her in warm water, fed her some olive oil and gently poked to see if oil the other end would help as well. After about 10 minutes of this she suddenly died . She was always the most wild of my birds and I cant help feeling that by trying to help her we caused her to die of shock. It seems that the instructions on helping egg bound chooks are easy until you actually have to do it, or did we do something wrong?

oh you poor thing, how sad.
I have no advice, i'm a chicken newbee but i really feel for you.

It was probably the shock of having the egg stuck that killed her. The diarrhoea and funny walk might have been an indication of something being wrong, but problems are difficult to spot sometimes, so don't beat yourself up.

It's always worth getting hens used to being handled in case any intervention is needed at any point, but you always get one or two who just won't tolerate it and it's unpleasant to have to push them if they really become distressed.

You did the right thing when you saw what the problem was and that's all you can do. I lost two of my hens when I first started - one died of parasite infestation (the breeder was a filthy sod) and the other of coccidiosis - both very treatable, but I just didn't have the experience, so it's happened to all of us at some point. You just have to learn and move on.