The Turtle That Wouldn't Die

[ladysprite]

It has come to my attention that, in the hectic mess that has been the last week or four of my life, I have not managed to get around to writing about some of the bits of wackiness that I encountered at work. From day to day, work hasn't honestly felt that wacky or amusing, but in retrospect I have to admit that there have at least been some fascinating and colorful cases. Like, for example, Speedy - the Lich Turtle Of Doom.



I was working at a clinic that I tend to visit fairly frequently, and it was near the end of the day when a woman came running in, crying that there was a snapping turtle on the road nearby that had been hit by a car - if she brought it in, would we euthanize it for her? Envisioning a poor, sad, tiny creature, I assured her that if she could get it to us, I would put the poor thing out of its misery.

Ten minutes later, she returned with an eleven-pound turtle bigger than my torso, that looked like it had been attacked with the Jolly Green Giant's can opener. I have always been impressed with the ability of reptiles to survive trauma that would turn us fragile, mushy humans into fertilizer, but without getting too graphic, I'll just say that this was the worst injury I have ever had the misfortune of seeing. Noone, outside of a surgical scenario, should ever see an animal's beating heart, however obscured by road detritus. It was upsetting, but I reassured myself with the thought that the unfortunate creature would at least be ready to pass as easily and quickly as possible.

That said, let me explain something. Reptiles do everything slowly. They grow slowly, eat slowly, breathe slowly, metabolize slowly, and they die slowly. I had this brought home to me the hard way in vet school, when another senior student and I monitored a dead iguana under anesthesia for four hours while its heart beat consistently once every minute or two, before coming to the realization that it wasn't going to wake up. But I was sure that this turtle, with its terrible injuries, hopefully would have an easier time passing.

I drew up three times the recommended dose of euthanasia solution, figuring that this was one time when literal overkill wouldn't be a bad thing, and injected it into the turtle's body cavity (finding a vein on a turtle is a laughable prospect, especially when said turtle is angry, covered in sharp bloody bone spikes, and hypotensive).

It leaked back out.

The technicians and I engaged in a short but vehement bout of squickedness, and then managed to restrain the poor critter enough for me to give a second injection into the muscle. I puttered around the clinic for twenty minutes or so, finishing up paperwork and phone calls, while the turtle slumped into unconsciousness. After it hadn't moved for a little while, I poked it to make sure it had passed away. It reared up and bit the stick that I had used to nudge it.

After three more rounds of inject/putter/poke/bite, I managed to convince myself that the snapper's reflexes were at least slowing down, and that no clinic would want to pay me my somewhat exorbitant rate to spend eight hours poking a turtle to see if it was dead yet. Luckily, the clinic was run by another vet who I'm fairly friendly with, so I called her at home and blithely informed her that I was leaving a mostly-dead turtle in the garage. At this point, I had given it enough lethal injection to kill a pony, and there was no way that it still be a going concern in the morning.

The next day, I trotted off to work at the next clinic on my schedule without a worry. And everything went well, until M, the vet from yesterday's clinic, called. "What happened with the turtle?" I asked, certain that I would be hearing the end of the story.
"She's standing up right now."
"Standing? And how did you figure it's a she?"
"She laid eggs last night."

Far from being dead, the turtle had, in spite of missing the entire right front quarter of her shell, managed to recover enough to threaten to nip the fingers off anyone invading her personal space. M. had already given her half again the dose of drugs I had last night, but Speedy, as she had been christened, didn't really seem to care.

Slightly nonplussed, I pulled out a textbook on reptile medicine, and opened it to the section on euthanasia.
"Let's see.... it says that liquid nitrogen is an acceptable and humane technique.... damn, but only for animals under 40 grams. And decapitation is only recommended for small snakes."
"Not much help, Beck."
"I'm looking, I'm looking. And it *does* say that critically injured animals may be in deep enough shock to slow down their metabolism and make euthanasia difficult."
"Yeah, we kind of figured that. Hurry up, she looks like she knows we're talking about her."
"Do you have a gun? There's a picture here with a diagram of where to shoot, I could fax it to you...."

I've collaborated on many cases in my professional life, and I hope to collaborate on many more, but I never thought I'd be in a situation that would take two vets twenty-four hours to figure out how to kill a dying animal. Eventually, with a heat lamp to push her metabolism into something like functional and enough pentobarbitol to bring her down by sheer drowning if nothing else, she passed away and we all breathed a bit easier, knowing that she wasn't suffering anymore.

Rest in peace, Speedy. You didn't so much shuffle off this mortal coil as slide inexorably but agonizingly slowly down it, but your stubbornness was somehow inspiring.

Comments

[janetmiles.livejournal.com]

Oh, man, that sucks in a lot of ways -- I'm sure it's hard enough to have to euthanize an animal,and to have it take so long sounds absolutely crazy-making.

But at the same time, you're right -- that much stubbornness is inspiring in its own way.