a protégé of Louis Pasteur, applied
the same techniques his mentor was
using to produce vaccines for rabies
and anthrax. He milked cobras and
injected tiny amounts of venom into
horses. After a few weeks, Calmette
extracted the horse blood and spun
out antibodies that targeted cobra
venom.
Snakebites killed more people back
then, but the World Health Organi-
zation still considers them a global
health crisis. Each year, snakes kill
more than 81,000 people and maim
hundreds of thousands more. Modern
antivenom is still made in livestock,
and while it has gotten more effective
over time, it is mostly species-specific.
In the United States, it’s also outra-
geously expensive. A single vial can
cost $18,000, and most victims require
four to six vials. Many clinics and hos-
pitals don’t stock it, and it’s rarely car-
ried by search-and-rescue teams.
A
fter the helicopter touched
down at Doctors Medical Cen-
ter of Modesto, nurses wheeled
me into the emergency room and cut
off my shorts and T-shirt, then hooked
me up to my first IV laced with anti-
venom. Five and a half hours had
passed since my bite. Over the next
72 hours, I’d receive 18 vials of the
lifesaving antidote.
Each of the half-dozen doctors I
saw told me that this was either the
first snakebite they’d ever seen or the
worst. Poison Control guided my care.
My leg, from toe to hip, turned black
and yellow and eventually swelled to
more than twice its normal circum-
ference. During my first day in the
hospital, I received morphine every
two hours, yet the pain remained too
severe for me to sleep. It felt as though
nerves were popping in my leg.
The orthopedic surgeon grew con-
vinced that I had developed com-
partment syndrome, a side effect of
swelling that cuts off circulation to
extremities and in the worst cases
leads to amputation. Fixing it would
require an only slightly less intrusive
emergency surgery—deep incisions
along the length of my leg to relieve
the pressure.
My night nurse, John, was a
71-year-old Vietnam vet who’d been
bitten twice by rattlesnakes. He joked
that I should have done what he did
to survive: eat the snake that bit me.
(“More gamy than fishy,” he said.) It
was John who saved me from going
under the knife. In the early morn-
ing, he found a pulse at the top of my
foot, a sign that I still had circulation,
which was enough to keep the sur-
geons from operating.
It took four days for me to move
from a bed to a chair. Two more to
stand up. And eight before the doc-
tors released me. Until then, Turin,
Bridger, and my parents stayed in
Queen in the hospital parking lot. Af-
ter I was released, it took a month for
me to walk normally and six months
for the swelling in my leg to go down.Drama in Real Life Reader’s Digestrd.com 107