The Snake Bite Story

So anyway one Sunday in the evening  maybe about 20 years ago I was cycling in the countryside outside Gainesville, Florida with my then ~6 year old son. I saw this colorful little snake at the side of the road. So it was a summer evening and snakes come out of the vegetation at that time and lie on the road as it is still warm, I suppose, I can’t read a snakes mind, but anyway they do do that. This means they get run over a lot and I feel sorry for them since they live here and humans and their great big fat fossil burner crap vehicles are destructive invasive immigrant species. So I decided I would save this particular little snake so I started banging it with the front wheel of the bicycle. It wouldn’t move, which might have clued me in, but it didn’t at that stage. So anyway I looked at it close up, it had no rattle, it was not flat grey and it looked rather like the harmless water snakes I had seen before. In fact I saw one just like it today, image above. So I just grabbed it by the tail and flipped it off the road into the vegetation. I did notice that it bit me and put two small holes in my right index finger, so I immediately thought “oops, that was not some harmless water snake, maybe getting bitten was a somewhat fairly bad thing”.

I showed my son the bleeding holes in my finger and we carried on cycling. So as we went on the finger got to sort of hurt a bit and started swelling. About half an hour later we got home and it was clear my finger was in some trouble. So I went to my snake book and found out that baby cottonmouths and/or water moccasins are sort of stripy reddish blackish snakes just like the one that bit me. They don’t look a bit like the adults at all, which are great big fat grey things. So I had been bitten by a poisonous snake- my finger now looked like a big fat sausage and I showed it to my wife who was shocked and horrified and told me to head down to the emergency room ASAP. Good advice I thought and off I went. So I sat there and eventually they saw me, but it turned out that very unusually there was another snake bite victim there, he got done by a rattlesnake. Riding his bicycle, he fell off, landed on top of a rattlesnake which tried to strike at his face but fortunately he put his hand in the way. So he got a nasty bite in the hand, better than the face, but still not good. So we bonded and said various negative things about Florida serpents, spiders, crocodilians etc. Anyway the meds looked at my finger and marked with a ball point pen how far up my hand the swelling had gone. That’s all they did, so I got to sit in the emergency room talking to the other snake bite guy and various other people with various other interesting and challenging things wrong with them. This was before smart phones, iPads, internets, whatever, so after an hour or so I got sort of bored with that. So I started to wander around a bit and there happened to be a little departmental office or something with a lot of medical type books in it. So I parked my carcass there and read everything there was on snake bites and in a couple of hours I knew quite a lot. So guess who gets bitten by snakes? Mostly males, mostly age 15-55, mostly alcohol related, whoda thunkit? So I was in the peak demographic except in my case it was not alcohol related, no really, I hadn’t touched a drop, honest. So I had amusing thoughts about drunk men picking up snakes and throwing them around or whatever, what asses male humans are. More to the point, what can you do about snake bites? Not much actually. The only therapy was antivenin which is this crazy thing where they inject horses with rattlesnake venom (what happens to the horses?) and the horse make antibodies to the rattlesnake venom and they get that out of the horse, call it antivenin, and inject it into the snake bite victim and it is supposed to neutralize the snake venom somehow.

So anyway I know a bit about antibodies and the literature also pointed out some potential flaws in the horse antivenin approach. One is that the cottonmouth and/or water moccasin is a different kind of snake from the rattlesnake, quite a distant relative, so any antibodies against rattlesnake stuffs may or may not, in many cases likely not, work on cottonmouth and/or water moccasin venom. Another is that if you just dump a bunch of horse antibodies into a person the immune system will quickly recognize the horse proteins as foreign and neutralize them and the person may also get an allergic response, then requiring a rat hole of more treatments, anti anaphylaxis drugs, expense etc. Finally I found out that snake venom from pit vipers, the group that include rattlesnakes, copper heads and that one that bit me, is a very complex mix of all kinds of nasty junk, proteases, nucleases, lipases and various toxins which serve to paralyze and also digest the tissues of the victim. Very nasty, and I couldn’t see how the horse antibodies could possible neutralize all the different components in this stuff.

So after three hours or so hanging around the emergency room the medics come back and with a ball point pen they marked where the swelling is on my hand, by now basically all of it. They tell me that they want to give me the antivenin but I raise the issues above and say I don’t want it. Nowadays this must happen to medics all the time, the unqualified expert, what with internets and all that, but in those days they were not used to being questioned by uppity patients so they got a bit sort of annoyed. Then it’s like midnight and they now want me to stay overnight and I flat out refuse. The finger hurts, the arm is now beginning to swell up dramatically but I otherwise feel fine and I am pretty sure I am going to make it through the night so I go home. So I have to sign something saying I refused the equine treatment and if I drop dead in the night it’s my fault and off I go.

The next day I go back to the emergency room as I am still alive and the medics look at me, note my continued apparently viable existence, but don’t actually do anything. So I go off to work, it being Monday, with my right arm sort of immobile and actually swollen to about twice the normal size, it looks like a big fat pink sausage. So I must look like one of those weird crabs with one normal arm and one huge one. Everybody notices this and asks me about it and so maybe thirty times I start out “well I was cycling down the road…”. So nowadays I would put the whole thing on Facebook or somewhere which  would save a lot of time.

So I recovered but it took ages. The arm stayed swollen for several days and then the lymph node in my armpit swelled up to the size of a large orange, which was quite uncomfortable. It looked like a huge ectopic breast, so I know what it feels like to have one breast anyway, but eventually it went away. The next thing was that I got these weird blood colored stripes down the side of my body on the side where I got bit. These went away after a few weeks but the site of the bites still hurt and one of the bite wounds got really infected. It basically formed a fairly large hole in the finger, as I said a lot of the stuff in snake venom digests tissues. It got so bad that I had to sit with a bowl under my finger as stuff was just continuously dripping out. Also the nail on that finger went black and fell off. After about six months I got some antibiotics which stopped the infection and it eventually healed up, but not perfectly. The nail eventually grew back but it is now growing about half the rate of the nails on my other fingers, and the finger tip never got full feeling to return, so there must have been some nerve damage.

Later I found out that baby pit vipers are actually about as dangerous as the adults. While the adults bite and inject a small amount of venom, to conserve the stuff, babies inject all they have. Some advice- If you see a snake don’t mess with it. Also if the snake is not scared of you especially leave it alone. Non poisonous snakes seem to know they are harmless so tend to take off at top speed if they see you. Cottonmouths and/or water moccasins are not scared of humans, many times I have jogged past adult ones and they just did not move away at all. As noted above the small snake that bit me was not going to move off the road merely because I hit it with my bicycle wheel. Today I saw another one on a path at a local park and this also did not move when I and other people went by. It knew it was poisonous, just like the one that bit me, so it knew that you mess with it at your peril.

I once read about George Orwell’s experiences in the Spanish civil war, particularly when he got shot through the neck by a sniper, which he stated was “quite interesting”. He thought he was going to die, you can read about that in “Homage to Catalonia”. It was quite interesting to be bitten by a poisonous snake also, not so life threatening, but, like George, I wouldn’t recommend you try it.