My Dad and I Were Bitten by the Same Rattlesnake on the Same Day
On Mother’s Day 2015, I got bitten by a baby rattlesnake while hiking with my family.
The whole thing started because I was trying to catch a blue-belly lizard. It darted under a pile of rocks, and like any kid with questionable judgment, I lifted up a nearby set of rocks to look for it.
Wrong rocks.
I felt two tiny pinpricks on my left thumb. At first it barely hurt, and I didn’t think much of it. Then I saw the culprit: a tiny rattlesnake. No rattle, no warning. Because it was a baby, it apparently dumped all of its venom into me. Unlike adult rattlesnakes, babies don’t always have good control over how much venom they release.
I didn’t tell anyone right away. I figured I was fine.
Then my brother noticed my hand was turning purple and swelling.
Within a surprisingly short amount of time, the swelling and pain started moving up my arm. You could actually follow the progression as it traveled through my lymphatic system toward my armpit. What started as two little punctures became incredibly painful.
Once my dad realized what had happened, he went back to the spot where I’d been bitten. My dad is a former Army guy who used to catch snakes and tarantulas for fun, so naturally his response was, “Let’s go find the snake.”
Somehow, he did.
The baby rattlesnake was still sitting in the grass near the rocks. His plan was to catch it so the hospital would know exactly what species had bitten me and what antivenom to use.
While pinning it down, the snake managed to nick my dad’s right thumb with one fang.
Fortunately for him, the snake had apparently already emptied its venom reserves into me. He ended up with a nasty blood blister while I got the full experience.
So now both my dad and I had been bitten on the thumb by the same snake on the same day.
On the way back to the parking lot, we stopped at the ranger station. Unfortunately, it was the ranger’s first day on the job. She looked understandably horrified and told us they didn’t carry antivenom.
Back on the trail, my dad attempted to drown the snake. That didn’t work. Eventually he used his pocket knife to kill it and brought it with us to the hospital. Fun fact: even a severed rattlesnake head can still bite reflexively, so that thing was dangerous long after it was dead.
The first hospital was actually very interested that we had brought the snake. It helped them quickly identify what had bitten me. The problem was that they didn’t have enough antivenom on hand, and because I was a minor, they decided to transfer me to Stanford Children’s Hospital.
By the time everything was over, I had received 14 bags of antivenom.
I remember endless nurses, endless questions, and one question in particular:
“Have you traveled outside the United States in the last year?”
As it happened, yes.
Six months earlier we had gone scuba diving in Belize. While there, a mother spider monkey got annoyed because her babies were playing around me. She charged over and bit my calf as a way of saying, “Stop distracting my children.”
The nurse just stared at me.
So within a year, I had managed to get bitten by both a spider monkey in Belize and a rattlesnake in California.
To make the story even stranger, my dad and I ended up in our local newspaper because of the whole rattlesnake incident.
Most people spend Mother’s Day having brunch.
I spent mine getting pumped full of antivenom after accidentally picking a fight with a baby rattlesnake.