Rattlesnake bites gardener... 10mins after he cut its head off
A HUSBAND who decapitated a rattlesnake that menaced his wife almost died after the head bit him ten minutes later when he picked it up.
Jeremy Sutcliffe learned the hard way that snakes can still bite and inject venom for at least an hour after their head has been chopped off.
Mr Sutcliffe, 40 – who had to rip the snake from his hand – went into a coma and his organs started shutting down as the venom coursed through his body. Doctors feared he might die and he required 26 doses of anti-venom before he recovered.
He and his wife Jennifer had been tidying up the garden of their home in Lake Corpus Christi, southern Texas, in preparation for a Sunday family barbecue. Weeding a flowerbed, Mrs Sutcliffe disturbed a four-foot long western diamondback, one of America’s deadliest snakes.
‘I almost grabbed the snake,’ she told the Washington Post. ‘It was not happy about that at all.’
When she screamed, her husband rushed over with a shovel and decapitated it. Assuming that was the end of the matter, he went back ten minutes later and was entirely unprepared when the head bit him as he picked it up.
Mrs Sutcliffe, a nurse, rang the emergency services and discovered the closest hospital with antivenom was more than an hour’s drive away. They had driven only two miles when her husband started losing his vision and having mini-seizures.
She said he was ‘pretty scared’, repeatedly telling her and their daughter, ‘If I die, I love you’ as he went in and out of consciousness.
He was eventually airlifted to hospital where his wife was told he had gone into septic shock. Doctors said he had internal bleeding and his blood pressure was dangerously low. Mr Sutcliffe had to be put into an induced coma and placed on a ventilator.
‘There were three different times in the first 24 hours that the doctors told me that they didn’t think he was going to make it,’ said Mrs Sutcliffe. ‘I kept talking to him and I kept telling him to fight it.’
Mr Sutcliffe came out of his coma three days later and is in a stable condition although his kidneys remain weak.
Being cold-blooded, reptiles have much slower metabolisms than warm-blooded mammals. While a mammal’s brain ceases to function after just few minutes without oxygen, a snake’s head will live on for a while and will still bite in a last-ditch effort to survive.
The western diamondback is responsible for the greatest number of snakebites in the US.