Wildlife veterinarian Nielsen Donato is no stranger to sharing recovery stories with his Instagram audience of over 20,000 followers, but one recent case has reminded viewers of the doctor’s brilliance.
In late April, Donato had a new client referred to him: A 4-year-old Aldabra giant tortoise who was accidentally run over by a vehicle while grazing in a grassy field.
Donato and his team at Vets in Practice in the Philippines did a full exam and discovered that the right side of the tortoise’s carapace — its shell — was shattered and collapsed. X-rays revealed fractures of the shell but no limb fractures, so the experts helped get the patient stabilized and managed their pain and soft tissue damage.
But the reptile was still struggling to move in its first week of hospitalization.
Donato had to get creative — and not for the first time. Last month, he helped another Aldabra tortoise with hind leg injuries by affixing wheels to his bottom carriage.
But this case was different.
Donato’s team got to work developing a customized, temporary brace that would help bring the fragments of the carapace closer together as they healed.
They placed temporary hooks and bands to the tortoise’s back, irrigating the damaged part twice a day with saline to help exposed soft tissue heal.
“At this point, our main concern is to stabilize the condition of the turtle from shock, from the injury,” Donato told Popular Science.
“So for the first three weeks, we made sure that there were no flies that laid eggs and turned into maggots.”
After three weeks, the team then designed a sturdier framework to hold the shattered carapace in position, a set of wires that held the shell together as inverted screws placed with epoxy putty kept it stabilized.
“When we were twisting the wire, we noticed that we were starting to align the shell and the cracks were becoming more opposed to each other,” he told Popular Science.
The tortoise’s care team sealed the cracks with dental acrylic once they were confident in their contraption. From there, the animal was free to go home with its owner, wearing the brace as it moved around.
After three weeks, it was brought back, and the team was able to remove the brace, wires, screws, and putty.
“The steel framework was removed and she was sent home to recover further,” Donato wrote on Instagram.
“When it visited us lately, it started moving around more actively,” he added to Popular Science, “and the owners were not worried about its appetite because it was eating again.”
Donato clarified in the comment section of a recent Instagram post that the tortoise’s carapace will calcify and heal, giving the tortoise a full life, which could be up to 150 years for the species.
“This poor baby,” one person commented. “The makeshift cast is amazing.”
“Sometimes you just have to love humans,” another wrote. “Just when you think there’s nothing nice going on, people go out of their way to save and help what most people would just call a stupid turtle.”
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Header image courtesy of Nielsen Donato/Instagram
