Lives on the Sea: Fighting the odds by sea turtle surgery

The loggerhead doesn't look alive, floating listlessly with its carapace shell leaning over, flippers limp underneath.

Workers in smocks hustle around the turtle's tank. The tension is visceral. A stretcher is brought in, the padding torn at the seam, the chassis rusted. The stretcher was donated used, like much of the equipment in the sea turtle hospital.

The soft flesh of the loggerhead's right flipper is swabbed with iodine. The turtle is sedated.

This will be veterinarian Shane Boylan's first brain surgery on a sea turtle. And he doesn't like the odds.

"Back in the tank," he tells the workers, his voice with an edge not usually heard from the amiable man. "Ten minutes. Back in the tank."

The other turtles

Feel-good stories are the glow around the South Carolina Aquarium's sea turtle rescue program. The usual throng of admirers showed up on a Kiawah Island beach Tuesday to watch two loggerheads and one Kemp's ridley turtle crawl back to the ocean. The releases brought to 77 the number of the endangered species the program has rescued since 2000.

What's lost in the oohs and aahs are the other turtles, the ones that are dead when S.C. Natural Resources biologists get to them, die in transport, die shortly after arriving at the hospital or just don't make it.

Nine in every 10 sea turtles are dead when they wash up, a lot of them struck by a boat or tangled in a fishing line.

Of the others, "by the time these turtles are found they are in critical condition. They are on their deathbed," said Kelly Thorvalson, the rescue program manager. "It's up to us to try to turn that corner."

This is what these guys do.

The first patient

It sounds like glamor, a sort of "ER" episode starring a beloved creature. The sea turtle hospital is a line of tanks in a bare concrete chamber similar to a basement, behind the doors from exhibits such as the four-story Great Ocean Tank.

For this latest surgery, the loggerhead must be rolled on the stretcher down a service drive, up a delivery ramp and through to the operating room, a folding table set up in the middle of an aquarium classroom.

The hospital wasn't part of the aquarium when it opened in 2000. But shortly afterward, S.C. Department of Natural Resources biologists brought in Stinky, a "floater," a turtle bloated with gas from an infection. He looked like a goner. They asked the aquarium, can you do anything for him?

Ten years later -- by the time the rehabilitated Stinky was caught and re-released in a survey trawl off the Georgia coast as an adult male ready to mate -- the hospital had long become a standing function of the aquarium.

The aquarium's sea turtle program operates on a $230,000 per year budget. It sounds like a lot at first blush. But medical care costs. The program couldn't make it without the flow of donated services and equipment, the stream of volunteers who come in to clean the tanks, do the grunt work. The budget itself comes from donations and fundraisers as much as ticket sales.

The makeshift operating facility looks like a M.A.S.H. unit.

'Always a chance'

The turtle's name is Barrington, after the resort near the Hilton Head beach where it floated up in June. It had skin lesions and a barnacle- encrusted shell, signs that it had floated for days.

Nobody knew at first exactly what was wrong. When the barnacles were removed they saw a dull white patch on its head, a shank of skull exposed when the turtle took a hard smack.

"Some kind of blunt trauma, right between the eyes," Boylan said. He suspected a bone fragment chipped off by the impact had abscessed, putting pressure on the brain. To be sure, it would take an MRI and a CT scan -- expensive tests. On Tuesday, the Charleston Veterinary Referral Center donated the tests.

The skull of a sea turtle is a thin outer shell with thick bone running down the middle between the eye sockets. In the middle of the thick bone is an opening big enough to stick in a finger but not much bigger. Inside that opening rests a brain the size of a caterpillar. The surgery will entail cutting away part of that thick bone and tenderly pulling out the fragment.

If they don't try, the turtle dies. If they fail, the turtle dies. If they succeed, the turtle could eventually be released to the ocean. Other than the bone chip squeezing its brain, the turtle is healthy.

"There's always a chance," Boylan said.

Too early to tell

As workers prep for Barrington's surgery, another loggerhead brought in that morning lies on a pad on the hospital floor with three cuts from a boat propeller. A slice almost took out an eye, another just missed the flipper. The turtle is very likely bleeding internally.

"We don't know yet because we don't have X-rays," Boylan said, but this turtle is likely worse off than Barrington.

On the aquarium's main exhibit floor, construction workers are putting the final touches on an aquatic animal medical facility, a stainless steel, three-room wonder with the telescoping booms found in human operating rooms. It's expected to open in two weeks. There's no real way to say how much it costs, so much was donated, including the booms given by Brechtold Corp.'s North Charleston office.

Meanwhile, surgery is on a folding table in the classroom. Barrington is wheeled in and three veterinarians go to work. Doctors Cheri Ristau and Nora Schmidt have donated their services.

They cut away the skull with a bone saw and work their way in, a worker shining a flashlight in the tight spots for them. The atmosphere is tense. It's two hours before the forceps slip in, pincer the bone fragment, and they replace the skull. Boylan's serious demeanor relaxes and he breaks into a big smile, his first of the day.

"Perfect," he said. "That's what we wanted."

It's too soon for a prognosis. It can take half a night for a turtle to fully come out of anesthesia. It takes a lot longer to nurse it back to health, to assess whether the brain is damaged or this turtle can be released.

For now, Barrington lives.

Reach Bo Petersen at 937-5744 or follow him on Twitter at @bopete.