In Oklahoma we have three species of venomous snake. Four, if you count the water moccasin or cottonmouth. They don’t always include it because a number of state biologists say they aren’t in the state. However, every “good ole boy” will tell you “that’s bullshit”. By far, the most common venomous snakebite is from the copperhead. We start seeing people bitten by this snake in the spring and they continue all summer long. Most aren’t all that life threatening. They are extremely painful though, and you can lose a digit or a toe pretty easily as a complication. These little rascals look like this:
(Image from Google Images)
Don’t see it? Yeah, that’s the problem. Trust me, it’s there.
So, most bites are on the foot as people traipse around in their flip flops and accidentally step on a snake hiding like this one. Except for this one time. This time when a guy comes in with two things I never thought I would see again.
He had two fang marks all right. I could easily see them and the tissue was quite swollen. In fact, it was so swollen that it was already turning bluish. He had been bitten on the upper lip. I asked him how he managed to get a snake bite on his mouth and his wife answered, “He was trying to kiss it.” I asked why he was trying to kiss it and she answered, “He thought it would be funny.” She was clearly irritated with him and his extreme lack of judgment. At least one of them had a normal IQ, I thought.
Because of the location of the bite, he deteriorated quickly and we had to treat him aggressively. Because of the rapid decline, I thought maybe this isn’t a copperhead after all. Maybe this was another species like a rattlesnake. So, I asked the wife to describe the snake for me. She reached down beside her chair and grabbed a bucket I hadn’t seen before. She whips off the lid and thrusts the bucket out at me and says “I brought it in so you could see for yourself.” I looked briefly into the bucket and saw a very live, and very active, 2-foot-long copperhead trying to climb out of the bucket. Fortunately, she slapped a lid on the bucket before it got out. We made her take it out of the department. Security caught her before she dumped it into the hospital flowerbed and made her put it in her car! Guess I was mistaken about her IQ.
I was also mistaken about not seeing another “kissing” snakebite injury in the ER. I’ve personally seen a few now, and I know others have too. As for live snakes … I’ve had about a dozen more since this one. So many, that I got into the habit of scanning the room for “the bucket” before asking what kind of snake it was.
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