M
Maggie Cummings
Guest
This will be hard for you to read, I am in tears as I write it. Wobbles is a very sweet pond turtle who lost her right front leg and had the nerves and tendons of her back leg severed by a commercial lawn mower at a golf course. She was a wild turtle until then and that was when she came into my care. She has never tried to bite me even tho she is wild. So she can't swim or hunt or be wild any more. I dearly love this little turtle.
Because she can't swim she lives in a 200 gallon aquarium with just 5 inches of water in it. She's an easy keeper, but about 3 weeks ago she stopped eating and when I offered food she would smell it then brush at her mouth with her elbow and her left foot. I've been sick so Yvonne posted the problem and Danny had me look in her mouth. I had done that before but I didn't see anything. This time my daughter in law helped me and we got her mouth open wide and there was a fuzz all over the roof of her mouth. Picturing the hard bony plate that I know is the roof, I took an orange stick to rub off the fuzz but what happened was I opened a large wound and made it bleed. The roof was not hard, it is soft with rot. OMG! How could she get something like that under my care??? Then how could I add to the hurt she already must be feeling? How awful. So we researched it on-line and proceeded with our treatment. My son held her while I forced open her mouth, Dawn took a q-tip saturated with a dilute Betadine solution and started to swab the wound. Wobbles then did something I thought I would never see, she opened her mouth wider and held real still as Dawn swabbed. It was obvious she knew we were helping her and she was getting some relief from this treatment. We didn't even have to hold her mouth open! Can you believe that! Even after I caused the rot, then opened a bloody wound she still trusted us and she got some relief from what we did. I feel horrible. There are no words I can use to tell how bad I feel. This is the sweetest little turtle and she sure didn't deserve what I did to her. So now *I* need to double check my husbandry and create a better way for her to live, if she lives thru this. She will be at the Vets the first thing tomorrow...to be continued
This is her in a better time. She no longer has the fat roll you see here. Just look at that sweet face. Her name is Wobbles (spelled by spel ck) because she wobbles when she moves.
Because she can't swim she lives in a 200 gallon aquarium with just 5 inches of water in it. She's an easy keeper, but about 3 weeks ago she stopped eating and when I offered food she would smell it then brush at her mouth with her elbow and her left foot. I've been sick so Yvonne posted the problem and Danny had me look in her mouth. I had done that before but I didn't see anything. This time my daughter in law helped me and we got her mouth open wide and there was a fuzz all over the roof of her mouth. Picturing the hard bony plate that I know is the roof, I took an orange stick to rub off the fuzz but what happened was I opened a large wound and made it bleed. The roof was not hard, it is soft with rot. OMG! How could she get something like that under my care??? Then how could I add to the hurt she already must be feeling? How awful. So we researched it on-line and proceeded with our treatment. My son held her while I forced open her mouth, Dawn took a q-tip saturated with a dilute Betadine solution and started to swab the wound. Wobbles then did something I thought I would never see, she opened her mouth wider and held real still as Dawn swabbed. It was obvious she knew we were helping her and she was getting some relief from this treatment. We didn't even have to hold her mouth open! Can you believe that! Even after I caused the rot, then opened a bloody wound she still trusted us and she got some relief from what we did. I feel horrible. There are no words I can use to tell how bad I feel. This is the sweetest little turtle and she sure didn't deserve what I did to her. So now *I* need to double check my husbandry and create a better way for her to live, if she lives thru this. She will be at the Vets the first thing tomorrow...to be continued
This is her in a better time. She no longer has the fat roll you see here. Just look at that sweet face. Her name is Wobbles (spelled by spel ck) because she wobbles when she moves.
