This is an update of the following post
http://forums.kingsnake.com/view.php?id=1088535,1088535

I lost my "little yertle" before I had a chance to get her to a vet. I had brought her in for closer observation and she seemed to go down hill rapidly within a few hours and died.

She had defecated in her water, and it looked basically normal,
so that seemed to rule out an impaction or constipation.

So I started doing more googling trying to figure out why she
had been reluctant to use her back legs and the only thing I
could find implicated a protazoan parasite called hexamite parva.

Anyone ever hear of this?
http://www.tortoisetrust.org/articles/proto.html

The only thing that doesn't fit with this, is that I
never saw anything unusual in her urine although I could
have missed it. It has never been uncommon to find urates
in the water, and she peed on me her last day and it looked
like urine, very clear, no urates.

She did develop some strange skin lesions on her back legs the last few hours, and one got pretty nasty right before she died.

A vet I have worked with over the past few years did a necropsy
on her and so far hasn't found anything conclusive although he was going to go back and look at the skin on the legs more thorougly.

He said he found some red blood cells in her bladder, which could indicate hexamita. He didn't see any hexamita, but those
are hard to see when they are alive. Little Yertle had been
dead in the fridge couple of days before I got her to the vet, and then he wasn't able to look for a couple of days.

The vet also said she wasn't egg bound, something we were
a little worried about although I didn't think she was fully
mature. He said he saw overies but no eggs. He also said
the muscle tone on her back legs were good. He did say her lungs looked a little "pneumonic", but that could have occured
post mortem. I know I never saw any nasal discharge or difficulty breathing.

We started treating the rest of the turtles in the group
with flagyl on Friday, just in case she did have hexamita.

Hexamita is very contagious and although I clean their water several times a day and often just leave the hose trickling into their bowl, there still would have been opportunity
for this to spread.

Anyway, I'm just trying to make sure we aren't overlooking anything. So has anyone ever dealt with hexamite, or had a
turtle with symptoms that involved the back legs? Any strange
skin lesions?

I've been hovering over Dottie(the other turtle in the photo I posted) because she was heavily exposed to Little Yertle, one reason I want to make sure we aren't overlooking something else.

Thanks for any info.

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