Life lesson: A decapitated snake can bite
It is a widely known fact that a chicken with a severed head can still run, but a decapitated snake? It can still bite.
Jeremy Sutcliffe, a 40-year-old Texas native, found this out the hard way. He and his wife, Jennifer, were outside doing yardwork on the morning of May 27 when she discovered a 4-foot-long rattlesnake in their garden. She screamed.
Her husband abandoned his lawn mower and ran to her, grabbing a shovel and lopping off the creature’s head with a single swing.
After about 10 minutes, her husband tried to dispose of the snake’s severed head, Jennifer Sutcliffe, 43, said. When he reached down, the snake — a Western diamondback — sank its fangs into his hand and held on for about 30 seconds.
“Finally he got the snake head pulled off,” said Jennifer Sutcliffe, who is a nurse. “I called 9 1 1 and just started driving because I didn’t know where to go exactly, what hospital carries antivenom.”
As she drove, her husband started having seizures and fading in and out of consciousness, she said. After transferring him to an ambulance, the authorities called a helicopter to take him to a hospital in Corpus Christi, Texas, about 40 miles from their home city of Sandia, that carried anti-venom.
“He said, ‘If I die, I love you,’ ” she recalled. “I think he knew it was bad.”
By the time he reached the hospital, his right hand — its middle and ring fingers punctured by the snake’s venomous fangs — had swelled and was covered in dark blisters. The doctors told Jennifer Sutcliffe that her husband was in septic shock and suffering from internal bleeding and low blood pressure.
Eventually, even with 26 doses of anti-venom in his body (the average treatment is between two and four), the doctors had to put him in a medically induced coma.
Four days later, on May 31, he woke up, clueless about how he had wound up in a hospital bed. Later in the week, when his memory of the attack returned, he said he wished he could go back in time and do things differently.
“Just knowing a snake head could still bite after it dies would’ve prevented him from getting bit,” she said. “A lot of people at the hospital had no idea. There’s not a lot of education out there about what you’re supposed to do with a snake.”
A bite from a decapitated snake can be even more deadly than a bite from a living one, said Christine Rutter, a veterinarian at Texas A&M University’s Department of Small Animal Clinical Sciences. If possible, a decapitated snake head will try to empty out its glands, Rutter said. “All the hormones, adrenaline, is maximized,” she said, “so whenever they bite, they give it all they have.”
In some Southern states where snakes are more populous — including South Carolina, Florida and Georgia — local media outlets have tried to teach residents how to tell whether a snake is venomous and what to do if they encounter one.
An expert told the Charleston Post and Courier to leave the venomous snake alone and “give it a wide berth.”
Jeremy Sutcliffe is more stable now, but he still suffers from kidney failure and risks having some of his fingers amputated.
On Thursday, his wife started a crowdfunding campaign to help pay the mounting medical bills. Antivenom can cost thousands of dollars per vial in the United States, according to research from the University of Arizona.