Ozzy: A Sea Turtle Rescue - Rescue-Clearwater Season 2: Ep. 3

On November 23rd, 2013, Ozzy arrived to us from one of our neighboring counties. Ozzy came in during our music theme and so letter O, Ozzy Osbourne. Our volunteers really find it fun to use naming themes to name all of our turtles. All of our turtles get a special name and we take great pride in that. Ozzy was a female sub-adult loggerhead. She was found floating. She had a very severe crab trap entanglement around her two front flippers. Now Ozzy was an interesting case because as a larger loggerhead that came in with a very bad entanglement and ended up with a very chronic wound. The crab trap had encircled both of her front flippers, particularly her right one. It was very severely injured. The wound extended all the way down to the bone, not only encompassing all of the soft tissue but also fracturing the bone there. So she did have a spiral fracture of her radius and ulna. So her condition was really serious and on top of that this wound was very chronic. So she'd been dealing with this for a while and that definitely puts us on high alert for infections and other things that might cause her to be more debilitated. Every turtle that comes in goes through a triage process. Ozzy's was no different. Hers was a little bit more intensive. They get glucose checks, they get fluids, antibiotics, vitamins, everything to kind of help bolster their immune system. With Ozzy we did a lot of wound care. Every week or so we did drain her pool and the reason for this is she was a very large turtle. So lifting her in and out of the pool we were afraid that that would cause excess stress on that fracture so we would drain her water down, put a nice little mat underneath her to support her and then actually do her wound care in the pool. And so when we did this we would remove any of the dead tissue, any of the scab that had been forming to basically assess how the tissue was healing and then also allow the new tissue to come in. We tried and we tried and we tried to get that wound to heal on its own. In bringing in a better radiograph or x-ray system we could see on that that there was actually material down deep in that area. So we actually with the help of Dr. Pelton, another veterinarian, went in and cleaned that all out surgically. Because as long as there is foreign material in there, even the body's own reaction, it's not going to heal shut. So our goal was get it as clean as possible and see how it does. Even with that though it just wouldn't close. So we tried to adapt a procedure that's been used in other species which is to actually take a part of the components of your blood, your thrombocytes, and concentrate those because they have been shown to help in the healing process. We wanted to pull a blood sample from Ozzy, spin her blood down and we wanted to collect all of her platelets, her thrombocytes. So we were going to make a thrombocyte-rich plasma. We put it in this small syringe and then inject them down into the healing wound to see if we can get the body's help in trying to close that area. So we actually did this on a number of occasions and it seemed to actually help. We were very happy because that was the next stage in taking Ozzy to the point where we would try to figure out what's next. If you think about Ozzy from the time that she came in, we were not even sure that the arm was going to survive. Because of this strangulation, it'd be like you tying a tight cord on your arm and cutting off the blood supply. We had what could have been a 50-50 chance of even saving the arm at all. In working with Dr. Marquardt, we decided to try to test the tissue in a way that was totally different from what anybody else has done in a sea turtle. And that's because we used a heat-sensitive camera, a thermogram, to be able to evaluate whether the tissue was alive or dead. Thermography has been used a lot in human medicine, other mammals, so dogs and cats. We have used it on winter, which is awesome, but it's not used very commonly in reptiles. So what we did is we came up with something different. We applied hot and cold to see if we could use that to assess how the blood flow was going to that damaged flipper. And so we actually applied ice to both her normal flipper on the left and her damaged flipper on the right, and we were able to see that her right flipper had a definite decrease in blood flow. Over time, what we did find was as she healed and as we were applying wound care and various treatments, this time actually decreased. What this told us was basically that the blood was returning to that flipper, it was healing like it should, and so long-term, this flipper was going to be viable and she should be able to heal it and use it normally. 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So in Ozzie's case, our final step was physical therapy, something we haven't done before here at CMA, but we were really excited to try it with her because she was, one, a larger turtle, and two, she had been sitting in a smaller pool to allow that flipper to heal. We wanted to make sure that she was going to be capable of going out in the wild and surviving and thriving. So she was moved to one of our resident pools. It's 17 feet deep and 40 feet across, so it's a sizable pool, really excellent for physical therapy. We've utilized the same pool for marine mammal rehab. Winter and Hope are a perfect example of that. So she did very well. She swam, she was able to get down to the bottom, use the entire water column, everything that we would have expected. And so she spent about six weeks up there, not only showing us that she's ready to go, but also strengthening that flipper and getting her ready to go back out to be a normal turtle. So after her time in the larger pool, Ozzie was swimming normally, eating normally, all of her diagnostics came back good, and she was ready to go home.