The ER patched me up...but our chickens died

Sunday morning I woke up with some pain in my calf, I figured it was just a pulled muscle and didn't think much of it. Later in the day I noticed a red spot on the back of my calf about the size of a silver dollar and thought maybe I got bit my something.  The red spot kept growing and getting darker, it looked almost like a bruise and there was a dull burning that accompanied it.  By 7:00 pretty much everything from my knee down was on pins and needles and I got nervous maybe it was a blood clot so Joe and I decided to make a trip to the ER to get it checked out.

After they ruled out a blood clot, they diagnosed me with cellulitis which I guess is a pretty common bacterial infection of the skin but it spreads rapidly throughout your tissue and can be pretty painful. They gave me medication for lime disease just in case and a prescription for antibiotics, drew a circle around it and told me to come back if it got bigger than the circle. By the time we filled my prescription at CVS and got back home it was after midnight. 

We had left our chickens out when we went to the hospital, they still had about 2 hours of roaming left and were tucked into our back woods with no desire to come out when we left.  There have been a few nights when one or two didn't come home and they always showed back up the next morning so we didn't think much of leaving them out for an extra hour or two...midnight was a little later than we thought we'd be.  When we got home I went straight up to bed and Joe went straight out to the coop to make sure the girls were tucked in safe and sound...but they weren't there.  He got a flashlight and saw that there were feathers strewn all over the yard and paths of feathers going into the woods.  Something (probably coyotes) ate all of our chickens. He came inside to tell me and I ended up crying myself to sleep. Chickens, to me, aren't pets in the way my dog is.  They're outdoor animals and they're there to serve a purpose (eggs) rather than being for companionship; but the idea of them being dragged off and eaten when they were supposed to be sleeping was a pretty awful thought. I had hoped that one or two made it off somewhere or escaped and would come back the next day, but it has been 2 days and no such luck.  

So for now...no more eggs :(  We're looking into getting new chickens; it's not really the right time of year but we found some chicks available on craigslist that we're going to look into.  I told Joe that we should build a big shelter around the coop and keep the chickens in there and protected all the time, never let them just roam free anymore.  He responded...just because there are sharks in the ocean doesn't mean we're not going to swim. 

Farewell Susie, Ruth, Penny and Rose...hope you ladies are resting easy.