When Human Wound Care Meets Sea Turtle Medicine: The Remarkable Fight to Save Rose

A young green sea turtle named Rose is getting a second chance at life thanks to an unusual collaboration between aquarium veterinarians and human wound-care specialists in South Carolina. Rose arrived at the South Carolina Aquarium after washing ashore on Seabrook Island with a long list of serious health problems, including cold stunning, pneumonia, low body weight and extensive damage to her carapace. But it was the severity of the shell injury, and the exposure of tissue over her spinal cord, that presented one of the biggest challenges for her veterinary team.

A Shell Injury With Much Bigger Consequences

For sea turtles, the shell is far more than a protective outer covering. Severe damage over the spine can threaten neurologic function and ultimately a turtle’s ability to swim, making an injury like Rose’s potentially life-altering.

Aquarium veterinarian Dr. Laura Whalen and her team were especially concerned because Rose’s injury crossed the midline of the carapace and left areas over the spinal cord exposed. Protecting that tissue became critical to giving the approximately 8-pound turtle a chance to recover, continue growing and potentially return to the ocean. Faced with such an unusual wound, the veterinary team turned to a group they had worked with before: wound-care specialists at MUSC Health.

Borrowing From Human Medicine

Lauren Turner, a family nurse practitioner specializing in wound care at MUSC Health, and wound-care nurse Glenda Burnette reviewed Rose’s case and suggested an innovative option: Restrata, a synthetic wound-care product used to support tissue repair in human patients. The MUSC team also helped connect the aquarium with local representatives, resulting in a donation of the product for Rose’s treatment.

Aquarium veterinarians then carefully applied the material to areas of concern along the damaged carapace and exposed spinal region. The approach highlights something veterinarians working with less commonly treated species understand particularly well: sometimes the best solution comes from looking beyond the traditional boundaries of veterinary medicine.

“Collaboration is huge across the board in this field,” Whalen said. For specialists caring for aquarium animals, those collaborations can be especially valuable because the patient population is small, the cases can be highly unusual and there may be limited published experience to guide treatment. Human medicine, engineering, rehabilitation and other disciplines can provide ideas and technologies that veterinary teams may be able to carefully adapt for animal patients.

Signs the Treatment Is Working

So far, Rose appears to be responding to the treatment. Whalen reported that tissue has begun growing into areas that previously left the spinal region exposed, and the hope is that those openings will eventually fill completely and provide much-needed protection over the underlying structures.

Recovery, however, requires patience. Rose has already been receiving care at the aquarium for nearly a year and a half, and sea turtles can heal much more slowly than many mammalian patients because of their metabolism. Both the development of disease and the healing process can take considerable time, which makes long-term supportive care especially important in cases like this.

“Rose has been a fighter every step of the way,” Whalen said. Her progress has been gradual, but the fact that the damaged area is beginning to fill with new tissue is an encouraging sign in a case that initially carried serious concerns about mobility and long-term survival.

One Patient, A Bigger Lesson

Rose’s case is about more than one injured sea turtle. It is a reminder of how much veterinary medicine can gain from cross-disciplinary collaboration, especially when clinicians are faced with a problem for which there is no obvious or well-established veterinary solution.

A wound-care technology developed for people is now helping an aquarium veterinary team protect delicate tissue in a threatened marine species. That kind of creative problem-solving becomes possible when specialists from different fields are willing to share knowledge, experience and resources rather than staying within the traditional boundaries of their own disciplines.

The ultimate goal is to see Rose return to the ocean, although that will depend on how completely she heals and whether she can function well enough to survive in the wild. After arriving cold, underweight and severely injured, however, she has already made meaningful progress.

If Rose eventually swims back into the Atlantic, her recovery will represent more than a successful rehabilitation case. It will also stand as a powerful example of what can happen when human medicine and veterinary medicine work together to solve an extraordinary problem.