My Snake Bite

On October 5, 2017, a copperhead snake bit me while I was working in my garden. Yes, I was barefoot, and no, I did not taunt the snake, step on it, or even see it before it bit me. It was one of those events in your life that divides the time into “before,” and “after.”

My garden was (for I have since moved) large and a bit overgrown. The weeds got ahead of me while I was pregnant with my toddler, Luke, during a hot South Carolina summer.  My young children regularly accompanied me to the garden and Luke, especially, loved playing in the dirt.  Despite the weeds, my garden was my favorite place to be, and I felt safe there: anywhere babies crawl must be free of danger.

Like many early October days in South Carolina, the day was warm enough for snakes to be active, although the blazing heat of summer had passed and it was cool enough that I could work outside during the heat of the day and my then-almost two-year-old’s nap.  My girls, ages 11 and 8, were inside completing a bit of remaining schoolwork from their homeschool day and playing.

I set out some fall vegetables, and I worked at pulling down some weedy vines that covered the fence.  Before walking into overgrown areas, I looked for snakes before I stepped.  I used a rake to pull at the vines and stood near a blackberry bush.  I advanced my foot one step closer to the blackberry plant, making sure I was stepping onto snake-free soil, and then felt a violent, painful strike, similar to the bite of a cat or a dog, against my foot.

I pulled back the plant to look for the source of the bite, and I found the biggest copperhead snake I had ever seen.  I immediately went into the house for help.

I told my children what happened and I called my husband. He was too far from home to help me although he did immediately start driving home. I called 911, and I began the interminable wait for the sound of sirens that signified the arrival of help. Less than ten minutes after the bite, I began to feel confused and sick.

I tried to call a neighbor or a friend to come help, but I found that I could no longer understand how to scroll through my contacts, select people based on their location and likelihood of being able to come to my house, and call them.  I sent my daughter to the neighbor’s house, but they weren’t home, and she was too young to go roaming around our neighborhood, in houses spread out on acres of land, in search of help.

My daughter told me recently that she said, “Why don’t you call (a specific friend) to come help us?” and I told her, “I don’t know how.” I don’t remember having this conversation, but she does. She was unfamiliar with my iPhone then and wouldn’t have been able to find and call a contact without my direction.  After this, I wrote a list of names and numbers of people to call in an emergency and affixed it to the bulletin board: she knew how to dial a number from the landline.

By the time the ambulance arrived, I was vomiting and even more confused. I never lost consciousness or became disoriented as to my location or my situation, but I wanted desperately to lie down and to sleep. I was in shock, I suppose, and the effects of the venom were working as the snake intended by immobilizing its prey. The firefighters who arrived before the ambulance told my daughter to lock the doors with the other children inside the house and they waited in the yard until my husband arrived while I left for the hospital.

Bites from copperhead snakes are rarely fatal: most healthy adults would eventually recover from a bite even without antivenin, although they might permanently lose the use of the affected limb. Some people have an anaphylactic reaction to the venom, and the snakebite might send someone with heart trouble into cardiac arrest.

If I had been bitten alone on a hike, miles from cell phone reception or other assistance, I don’t know what would have happened to me. I could not have walked miles, and with my confusion I would have easily been a victim of the environment. My foot became extremely painful within 20-30 minutes as the original bite, which quickly swelled into a lump about as big as a half-dollar, morphed into a dark line of venom as it moved up my leg.

The snake that bit me, I have come to believe, was a mother in the process of giving birth. Copperheads give birth to live young, and in the days following my bite, my husband discovered several baby copperheads in the vicinity. I believe she was already agitated because of the process of giving birth, and she wanted to put an end to my snooping around her delivery room. She gave me a full load of venom and struck me twice in succession with every bit of strength she had.

The rest of the afternoon was a blur of my first (and, I pray, last) ride in an ambulance, being rushed past all the people waiting in the ER for more minor ailments to a room already prepared for me, endless repeated questions (I handed the ambulance driver my ID so he would quit asking me my name and address, because it was just too hard to gather my thoughts enough to speak), pain through shots of morphine, stomach upset, and confusion. I had a terrible metallic taste in my mouth and my lips, fingers, and toes were numb.

They came to ask me my permission to administer the antivenin, Cro-Fab, because not only is it expensive at $11,000 a vial, it is not without risk to the patient. I just wanted the sickness and pain to stop and didn’t much care, at that point, what ended it. After perhaps 6 or 8 vials of antivenin, my head cleared (except for the morphine of course) and I no longer felt so sick. They admitted me to a room in the ICU where the records say I was at risk of multiple organ failure and in critical condition.

My blood clotting factors and several other chemical markers were abnormal: I will not go into the particular details here, but in general, the snake venom was causing my blood to thin too much and many other items typically found on a lab report were abnormal.  You can see how watery my blood is as it leaves the puncture marks on my foot.  A severe bite is one in which the venom moves past one joint. My bite was on my foot, and it moved past my ankle, knee, and eventually my hip.

By the next morning,  the nausea, metallic taste, and numbness had returned and the purple sharpie marks continued the trail up my body past my knee and up my thigh. I was given more antivenin the next morning for a total of 10 vials. My leg continued to swell up into my stomach area and when I was discharged from the hospital the affected leg was 10 cm larger in diameter than the other leg.

Some people have told me they were bitten by a copperhead and it was no big deal, they didn’t even go to the hospital. It is certainly possible, although foolish, to avoid the hospital for a mild bite. If you have a small bite which turned out to be a warning without the administration of much or any venom, you might not need treatment. You won’t have the line of purple swelling moving across your body or the abnormal lab results.

But you won’t know what sort of bite you got until damage is done, so please get to the hospital. Spencer Greene, MD, Director of Medical Toxicology at Baylor College of Medicine describes the treatment protocol in for snakebites in this article.

Apparently, a great many people are bitten by snakes while drinking alcohol. The intern who came in to interview me about my experience concluded the assessment, and then came back into the room later, as if her supervisor had told her to return, to ask if I had been drinking when the bite occurred. I looked at her as if she was crazy and told her no.  So, my tip of the week is don’t play with snakes (ever) but especially if you have been drinking.

After my discharge from the hospital,  which included 2 nights in ICU and 3 nights in a regular room, I went home.  I experienced excruciating pain if I even dangled my foot off of the side of the bed, and timed my movement from the bed with administration of Percocet.  I have had 3 babies and three c-sections, and this pain was far worse than anything I have ever experienced.

The best way I can describe the pain is to think of the time you really barked your shin on a metal table and have a huge lump of a bruise on your shinbone.  You wince in agony every time you touch it accidentally.  Then imagine that pain extending all over your entire leg where it is impossible to avoid touching it. The pain did eventually disappear and I began to walk normally within a couple of weeks.  I still needed a lot of rest and if I stood very long my leg began to ache.  Within about six months, I felt normal and had recovered physically.

 Although I had recovered physically, I did have what I call “Snake PTSD.”  When I came home from the hospital, I had someone inspect the yard for snakes before the children went out to play, and when they did I required them to wear snow boots. My hypervigilance decreased with time, and I felt much safer after we moved from that property (about a month before the bite we broke ground on a new home).

Two years later, I have fully recovered from the snakebite. My children and I traverse the yard again barefoot, although we do not enter any areas that might be overgrown without boots.  We live in the country, well away from the road, and my children go in and out of the house without consulting me or passing the mommy-shoe-police the way they would have to if we lived in a more urban setting.

It’s the way I grew up too: during the warm months we went barefoot unless we were going out in public.  If I weren’t barefoot that day in the garden, I would have been wearing flip-flops, which would not have protected me at all from the snake.  We are more cautious now, of course, and we look for snakes everywhere.

If I feel sick or tired, and I also have to spend a lot of time standing, my “snake leg, ” as I have come to call it, does ache. But this is no longer a regular occurrence and is only a problem during times of extreme physical exhaustion and long periods of standing.

I am still prone to startling excessively if something I cannot see or do not expect touches my foot, even if I am sitting in the house and I know rationally that it cannot be a snake. I do not know if that will ever go away. I do not hate snakes, and I have purposefully visited the copperheads in the zoo as a sort of closure. I am not really more scared of snakes than I used to be, but I definitely look for them everywhere.

At my new garden, I am extremely vigilant about keeping the weeds under control. I started with newly cleared ground, and, through the years of experience in my old garden, have kept control of the weeds. I even wrote an eBook about it, How to Have a Weed-Free Garden   available on Amazon. 

For awhile after the bite, I wondered if I could ever enjoy the garden or the outdoors again.  I thought about moving to a house in a subdivision or even into the city.  I would stay indoors and do whatever it is people do that don’t like to go outside.

But we had broken ground on our new home in the country and the house was already framed.  A sudden move to the city was the fleeting notion of a panicked mind.

I must be outside with my hands in the dirt, daily.  I need the woods and the peace of the country, and I need to grow things in the garden.  I have not given up the garden; instead I have moved from a mere garden to a farm.  I just wear boots when I have to be in overgrown areas.