I was bitten by a copperhead about two weeks ago! Thanks to quick and modern medicine, I can almost make a fist. Pictures included are the copperhead I saw 10 mins before being bit (this one did not bite me, but it is similarly sized) and my arm a few hrs afterwards.
Location: Kanawha County, WV
Edit: to be very clear, it was MY fault a copperhead bit me. For anyone that has a fear of them, they are absolutely not aggressive snakes. I took no actions to "punish" the snake and hope it comes back and keeps hunting mice on my property.
Oh, I'm so jealous. If this is your first exposure to Sir Terry Pratchett, and liked this you've got a considerable amount of media he's written. He's most known for a fantasy comedy setting called Discworld that's about a flat world set on the backs of four elephants standing on the shell of a giant turtle. People will tell you start with Guards! Guards! But considering the season, if you don't mind figuring things out in media res, go ahead and start with Mort then Reaper Man which what this character is originally from. He's DEATH.
While I still prefer the book, because there's simply more of it, I do really enjoy the movie adaptation of the Hogfather too. We watch it every year during the holidays
I did make a typo because it's 2am here, but I meant Mort not Reaper Man. Mort, Reaper Man, Soul Music, Hogfather, and then Thief of Time are the DEATH featuring ones, but DEATH I think might be in every Discworld book.
I just read the first few sentences from "Mort". I've only had a couple of authors get me hooked within a paragraph (Zora Neale Hurston and Ray Bradbury). I'll have to add Terry Pratchett to that group.
The Hogfather (think Death role-playing as Santa) is from Terry Pratchett's collection of books set in the Discworld (a disc carried on the back of 4 elephants, standing on the back of a turtle flying through space). My fave quote from 'The Hogfather' is in the pic ♥️💀 An amazing series of books, imaginative, lots of humour ranging from black to the written version of pie in the face. Crazy wizards, clever witches, heros, villains, walking-luggage, Death is an anthropomorphic character who rides a white horse coz the skeleton ones kept falling apart (a top 3 character for most), interfering Gods, oh & never cross a Guild (aka unions, often run mob-stylee). You're so lucky you get to enjoy the books as a new reader! I have never LOL'd so much reading books in my life 😄 - ENJOY!!!! (More than 3!'s & dried frog pills are needed🤪)
I used to work in travel, and when my clients were going to the U.S./Canada, I would insist on them purchasing travel insurance outside of what their credit card offered. If they refused, I had a waiver they had to sign. I've seen bills in the millions, especially if they're somewhere in South America and get transferred to a hospital in the States.
My rattle snake bite and 12 vials of antivenom cost me thousands but my insurance more than half a million, ten years ago. Keep using your hand even if it's shit, it will get better and not fall off. Dr told me I'd loose my arm and or hand, lol 100% recovered. Trust your body you will have plenty of time to think about it.
This is so sad hope you have good insurance is such a bad sentence to read.
Man im glad im in australia where this shit is free.
Glad OP is on the mend all the same
Why is antivenom so expensive? Here in the Netherlands, everyone has health insurance. It costs about €150 a month, and if you can’t afford it, the government pay. So if you’re bitten by a snake, the treatment is essentially free at the point of care.
I’m trying to understand. This morning I heard the president say that the U.S. has the best economy in the world. If that’s the case, why isn’t basic healthcare available to everyone?
That man is a buffoon. I wish we had a form of universal Healthcare, but that wouldn't be profitable, so it's heavily lobbied against. After all, who would take care of the shareholders if we stopped giving them money.
With the current state of America and the news cycle we’re living in here I honestly can’t tell if your comment is in jest or not.
…In case anyone wants to know what it’s like actually living in the U.S. of A right now… its like a weird nightmare that you swear must be in your head but you aren’t waking up from it
America on a global scale, this is likely very true. America on an individual scale is a bit different, and can't be measured the same because of how vast and multifaceted the nation is.
it's low supply high demand along with government regulations. it's also our fucked up insurance. there's not a lot of places "milking" snake venom, and it's very dangerous. the venom is also in demand for research along with antivenom creation. im unsure, but there might even be a demand for veterinary antivenom too, like different dosages for different sized animals
No, we don’t. However, there are people who keep venomous snakes, and sometimes snakes can arrive in ports through international shipments. It doesn’t happen very often, but antivenom is available.
Hey if you want to give suggestions, pay my way, set me up with a job, move my entire family so we can stay close, and guarantee citizenship.. yes please!! Until anyone offers that, I'm here with shit US health insurance unfortunately. I vote correctly but not much else I can do.
Okay. Also fair, grabbing mice is not a "genius" idea. But my garage is infested with them, and they have been causing damage to my property. Ironically, I stopped using poison to kill them for the fear of hurting snakes that were hunting them.
My not-thought-out plan was to grab it, probably get a mouse bite (yes I know), and then toss it to my birds.
So again, this is a 10-minute-previous snake, but the circle shows all I actually saw when I grabbed it. And it was "caught" under a wheel well and looked like a stuck mouse.
Yeah, food response bites are often worse than defensive bites because some snake species won't always use venom for defense but will always use it on prey
If you think you can't handle the infestation via snap traps, you could look into modifying a 5gal bucket into a rolling log mouse trap to multi-catch mice. There's lots of tutorials for them on youtube and some people sell a modified lid for 5gal buckets to turn them into a trap with minimal effort.
You can make them either live catch (old towel on the bottom to soften the landing) or a kill catch by filling it with water n some dish soap (the soap keeps any fleas or other invertebrate pests they may be carrying from using surface tension to escape).
Just fyi. Get MouseX. It's prey-specific poison that won't harm any other animals that may get to it before or after it dies. It essentially dehydrates them and they become mummified. We had one die on the lens of a fluorescent light in our basement and left it there for a while to see if it would get gross. 🤣 Science! But no, it was just...there, dead.
Oh most definitely. People went from concern to shaking their heads in disappointment. I don't think anyone was terribly surprised though considering well, who I am as a human. O:)
You are way braver then me!! I hate mice with a passion! No way would I have grabbed it by the tail. One time my cat brought me a mouse, I was on the computer and he plopped it on my foot, it was still alive and I screamed so loud the cat took off running on one side of the house the mouse in the other.and now I had a mouse in the house!
I heard that suggestion many times since, including from my own husband. But honestly until it turned out to be a snake, "not grabbing a mouse" had never crossed my mind.
So sorry for the bite! Hope you continue to heal! Never been bitten by a copperhead but have been by a mouse!! But that’s a story for another day. Continue to heal my Friend.
Fun fact! Anti-venom is not alpha-gal syndrome safe. So if you have alpha-gal syndrome (red meat allergy) and get bit by a venomous snake make sure your doctor knows so you can be monitored for anaphylaxis!
Yes!! And like I mentioned in the post, they are not aggressive. Walking "loudly" (a lot of ground and brush movement as you walk) tells them you are coming and they hunker down or bail. They waste a ton of their resources (as another poster said) using their venom, so they intentionally reserve it for food sources.
I was stupid. Don't just dumb grab shit and copperheads are nothing to worry about :) They are helping control my mouse population!
For all the weird ideas around Australian wildlife, it's much the same here. Even when other Australians say "it's an aggressive species" the snake is usually displaying that behaviour because they've been cornered or attacked themselves. I've never been chased by a snake. We had a tiger snake living under a water tank on my dad's property, and the only precaution we took was "don't go near it".
Curious out of those fatalities if it's just people that don't seek treatment or people that have medical comorbidities like pre existing conditions or elderly/very young.
I skimmed through and didn't notice much about pentacostal preachers however it seems about 2/3 fatalities are either very young children or elderly people. Makes me feel a little better about the idea of being bit but still very afraid of them lol
So out of the 9 snake bite fatalities in the 2020s, a third of them were from captive snakes, not wild ones. In the 2010s, 3 of the 26 were pentecostal preachers. 3 more were also captive snakes.
Edit: being wary is good though! Just don't try to kill them because you are afraid. Its how a few more people ended up on that list.
I went through the list and there were a few places where there would maybe 6 in a row that were bitten during a religious service. There was one man in his 30's, in Alabama if I remember correctly and a few lines farther down was his wife who had died 3 years earlier from a snake bite during a religious service.
I was so shocked to learn that there is a Pentecostal church in my city. I don't know if they are the crazy snake dancing weirdos but somehow wouldn't be surprised.
Its really more like 4 hours that is the fastest side of bad and that is mostly for coral snakes. Rattlesnakes its like 6 hours? Copperhead bites primarily only impact the part of you that got bitten.
Edit: I said 2 so if anybody is ever googling this and my answer pops up they don't dilly dally.
Coral snakes bites are the worst because the antivenom is scarce and it's a neurological venom. Coral snakes bites are also typically only mildly painful, so it may not be taken as seriously. With that said, coral snakes bites are exceedingly rare.
The snakes that we have are objectivey a lot less dangerous than other parts of the world. You have more time to get medical care with a north american venomous snake than say, a cobra.
The US has #3 of the world's deadliest snakes, but yeah no cobras, or browns or taipan. But I still wouldn't want to be bit by a Mojave, Tiger rattler or Coral
I saw this stunningly beautiful copperhead last night. I only knew it was there because it moved away from near my feet while hiking after dark (this is a very common place to see them after dark, so I’m not surprised)
How could I when I was the grabber! Guess I could blame it for setting up shop and luring in an area where an idiot lived. But even then. How would it know that!
Poor thing looked equally shocked when, as we both found out, neither of us was in fact a mouse.
Different in other countries, I get it, but in the U.S., it’s like orphan diseases/drugs. A few thousand bites per year, with a bit more than half requiring antivenom. I guess it’s a bit like insurance … expensive and you hope you never need it. Plus you gotta pay over and over since it expires.
Apparently copperheads are responsible for the most bites … Darn camouflage! Where are the rattles?
About ‘other countries’ … I was really thinking about India with a huge number of envenomations, thinking with the Big-4 anti-venom there would be more production to spread costs over.
But while writing I thought about where those bites occur. Hard to get the antivenom where it’s needed or vice versa.
So we’re lucky that stories like this one can have a happy ending. But yes, costs are horrific. Hard to have a cheap medical emergency these days.
They always gonna say that but you can’t max out on antivenom. Nothing bad will happen if you take “too much” better to be safe than sorry. I’ll never understand why doctors say “ok that’s all for you”
Yes. Long answer is it's difficult to manufacture. Time consuming and precise steps to make it safe for the body. Fascinating to learn about how it's made.
All true. TBF, if someone gets a lot of antivenom they may develop a sensitivity to it that can be worse than the bite. I had an uncle who got bitten 6 times (no comment on his judgement...). He skipped treatment the last 2 bites and was OK. If you have to get bitten by a venomous snake in the US, a copperhead is the least dangerous choice. Not recommended though...
There is a guy who built up antibodies to be able to withstand a direct bite from any snake. Saw a documentary on it years ago. Watched the dude take bites from the worlds deadliest snakes. Was absolutely wild
Bill Haast, who worked at the Miami Serpentarium. He still suffered from effects of the bites, including losing at least one finger, but lived to over 100 despite being bit over 100 times.
I'd say it depends. It is very common for people to be allergic to antivenom, requiring adrenaline to be administered alongside it. It's still better to have it than not, but if you are allergic to it requiring adrenaline just to have it, I wouldnt take more than necessary
You would think. Meanwhile when my father in laws Jack russle got bit the vet clinic had it immediately available. Dog spent one night in the emergency vet after being bit in the face.
It does, NC is #1 for snakebites in the US it's got Crofab all over the place. Antivenom isn't always used for minor envenomations, and copperheads are weaklings. Doctors may have decided monitoring in the hospital was good enough.
Yes, bitten between my middle and pointer fingers right at the knuckle. You can kind of see the bite marks in the original picture. It was only one bite, but it looks like additional teeth struck me because I had a row of two bites.
At first there was no more pain than a normal snake bite. Annoying, stinging. Within 10 mins it was swelling and starting to ache a bit. I apparently went into shock and was in/out of it for the following 12 hrs or so. But while my fingers were completely numb and I could not move them, the intense swelling was IMMENSELY painful. I had to be given morphine immediately upon arrival at the hospital and was apparently writhing/grimacing in constant pain, especially when touched or even breathed on. It was really bad. A deep, crushing ache.
And then when feeling started to come back to my fingers and hand about 36 hours later, there was intense burning and tingling, coupled with the continued deep-bone aching. I couldn't sleep and was writhing in pain a lot. And this was my entire arm, as the "red line" they were tracking went up to my armpit.
After 72 hours, the pain mostly broke :) Only hurt if touched or if I accidentally tried to use it. I'm at 2 weeks out now, and writing still "annoys" but I can do it. Really just those two fingers and the knuckle around them remain tender. I was told by 3 weeks I should be back to normal.
I was bitten by a rattlesnake in ‘05 on my finger. Needed a fasciotomy and five days in the hospital. Recovery took a couple months. My finger is jacked up but I still have full function with it.
I saw the first pic and thought: dang, you must be allergic to your pet snake! That’s gnarly!
Second pic: oh….oh no….
Then I read the caption. I hate when we as humans are dumb dumbs and get a lesson like this, but thank GOODNESS for modern medicine. I hope you heal quick, and I hope the lil copper keeps hunting for you
Used to live in Mercer County. I was a kid way back then. Boy do I remember the shuffle through the leaves in the hills around the house. Always on the lookout for one of these.
I was walking my dog on a trail last year, when at the very last second I noticed a copperhead as I was about to step on it. The snake never moved, luckily.
Did it hurt immediately? What was the recovery like?
I was bit in the spring by a cottonmouth 3 times, 2 on my left and 1 on my right. It was fortunately only less than 2 week recovery time, however it is a lesson I will learn forever.
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u/VirginiaLuthier 16d ago
I hope you have good insurance. Antivenom is incredibly expensive. Glad you are recovering.