This little guy is my personal hero, and I will tell you why.

Last November, during one of the first truly cold weeks of winter, I got a call about a sick turtle who needed my help. The other rehabbers at the center were planning to send the poor creature to be uthinized as soon as possible, but they wanted me to look at it first, just in case. The first time I picked him up, I sucked in my breath. This pitiful creature had the worst upper respiratory infection I have ever seen before or since. In short, every orifice of his head was filled with pus. Eyes, ears, nose, everything. With every breath he made pathetic, heart-wrenching noises, and green discharge bubbled out of his nose. His eyes were sunken in under bubbles of pus, and both sides of his head were swollen. Horribly emaciated and dehydrated, his skin hung off of him, and he lay listless, waiting to die. It didn't look good.

But one thing you should know about me, is that I am a sucker for lost causes, and he went home with me.

After several rounds of fluids and many long warm soaks, he seemed a bit brighter, if no less pitiful. My veterinarian recommended euthanasia, I considered it long and hard. There was no doubt that the poor turtle was suffering horribly, and there was no certainty he would even be able to see again if he managed to miraculously recover. But... there was a chance, if small. He had already survived impossible odds just to reach me, and was still fighting. I couldn't give up on him so easily. I decided to give him his chance, but not to drag out the inevitable too long if it became clear the treatment wasn't working.

I nearly gave in, and let him go every day for the next two months. There were daily soaks (and sometimes nightly, when I woke up to check on him), fluids, prying terramycin in what seemed like must be his eyes, silvadene for his healing ears, sucking discharge from his nose with a syringe, antibiotics, and force-feeding small amounts of food as my vet would not place feeding tubes.

After the first three weeks with little improvement, I held him up one night to say my goodbyes when I noticed... one nostril had cleared. Just the tiniest thing, but it stayed my hand. By the end of the week, the second nostril cleared, and he was breathing clearly and without distressing noises for the first time. This was on Christmas Eve. It was the best present I could have asked for.

Slowly, slowly, his infections cleared up one by one... eyes, ears, nose.... and yet he would not eat on his own. By February it was clear that the infection had taken both his eyes. He would never see again. Despairing, I nearly had him uthinized on the spot. I have seen too many miserable blind wild animals kept in the name of education, and I would not do it. I could not justify keeping him alive if he could not live out his life as a box turtle should.

However, it was my vet this time that convinced me to keep him alive. He had made it this far, my vet reasoned, and there was no reason to immediately assume his quality of life would be terrible without seeing how well he would function without his sight. I decided to give it more time, and see how he would adjust. So far he still was not eating on his own, and I decided to make this my measuring stick. If he could not learn to eat on his own, he would not survive. I stopped force-feeding him. It was time to see how badly 'blind turtle', as I affectionately called him, wanted to live after all.

A week went by. Two. Every night I sat by him for hours, holding every variety of good smelling food in front of his face until my fingers went numb. Nothing. Not even bananas or strawberries would coax him. Anything I tried to pry into his mouth was spit out. Finally I admitted defeat. 'Blind Turtle' clearly was throwing in the towel. I had done everything I could, there was nothing more to do but end his ordeal.

The night before I planned to take him back to the vet for the last time, a neighbor sent us a basket of fresh picked blackberries. I treated my turtles to them, and, really more out of habit than anything else, placed one in front of blind turtle's nose. He pulled his head out immediately, interested. He sniffed the berry all over, and then, to my joy, he took a feeble bite. And another. And another. He ate the entire blackberry, and was looking for more. I was shaking with hope, and ran downstairs to the kitchen to gather up every scrap of good food I could find. For the next three hours I sat by him, offering him bites of various vegetables and earthworm interspersed with mouthfuls of blackberry. He ate everything. I cried.

Over the next few weeks, he became the most voracious eater I had the pleasure of caring for. It wasn't long before I no longer needed to use tweezers, or coax him with blackberries-- if set down on a bowl of food after soaking, he would begin eating immediately. Once he ate an entire platter of food, and I came back to find him stretched out on top of the empty plate with all four legs extended as he slept and projected the attitude 'I can't believe I ate the whole thing!!'

And so he came to his name, and his place in my life. He can never be released, but he will always have my constant care. I do not mind at all. Someday I hope to move him to an outside enclosure for warm weather, but for now, he is too easily upset by the slightest change in his environment to tolerate it. .

He has a routine now, and he has learned every inch of his inside enclosure. In the mornings he stretches out in his water bowl underneath the lights. At least three times a week I sit out with him on the porch as he soaks in water, stretching his neck out in the warm sunlight he cannot see. It seems that life is not so very bad after all, being a spoiled blind turtle."