Poor Lily the Turtle

When I started doing my living room, one of the things that I wanted to make sure that I did was move the turtles closer to a window.  I did that but the side that ended up by the window was the mirror side so it didn’t help much. `

Anyways, the reason that was so important was because the turtle tank had pretty much gotten buried under all the clutter.  We could hardly get to it to give them their food.  So as we re-did the living room, I wanted it out where they could be by a window and we could easily get to them.

We got the first turtle, Lily, when she was pretty little.  The twins were in first grade and caught her at a pond by their school.  We didn’t know anything at all about turtles so Lily ended up getting MBD.  It’s a disease that turtles get when they don’t have UV lighting.  We got UV lighting after we learned about it and she was doing good.

The next summer, the kids caught another turtle and we named her Shelly.  Things were going good.  Then a friend of ours asked if we wanted two more, supposedly just like Lily and Shelly.  I said no but these turtles got dropped off at my house while I was at work one day.  I came home and there were two giant red eared slider turtles in the tank with Lily and Shelly.  Lily was tiny next to them and ended up with a big bite out of her tail.  We quickly got rid of those monsters but poor Lily had taken the brunt of their visit.

What remained of her tail quickly got infected so I took her to the vet.  He said she was in very good health except for her tail.  He scraped all the infected skin off and sent us home with it a little bloody.  I had to give her shots of antibiotics every day for two weeks.  It’s not easy giving a turtle shots when you’ve never given anyone shots before.  It was a rough two weeks but she survived.  The stump of the tail grew into two parts so she looked like she had two tails.  It wasn’t very pretty but she did okay with it.  That was about seven years ago and turtle life has been pretty uneventful since then.

Today, my son noticed that she wasn’t looking good.  When we took her out of the tank, I saw that somehow her tail was all infected.  He put her on the floor and she hardly moved.  We went away for a few hours and when we got home, she was gone.  She had gotten a little treat of a piece of hot dog this morning and got to spend a little time out in the sun before she died.  I’m angry at myself for not noticing that her tail was infected.  I’m sure that’s what it was.  I would have taken her to the vet if I had caught it sooner.  Poor Lily 🙁

I wrote the whole story with pictures of them here.