READER’S DIGEST
June• 2019 | 59FROMOUTSIDE(JUNE ‘18) © 2018 BY KYLE DICKMAN. OUTSIDEONLINE.COM.antivenom. Over the next 72 hours, I’d
receive 18 vials.
Each of the half dozen doctors I saw
told me this was either the first snake-
bite they’d ever seen or the worst. Poi-
son Control, which the nurses called
every two hours, guided my care.
My leg turned black and yellow and
swelled to more than twice its normal
circumference. During my first day in
hospital, I received morphine every
two hours, yet the pain remained
too severe to sleep. It felt as though
nerves were popping in my leg.
The orthopaedic surgeon grew
convinced that I had developed com-
partment syndrome, which cuts off
circulation to extremities and in the
worst cases leads to amputation. Fix-
ing it requires emergency surgery to
cut deep incisions along the length of
my leg to relieve the pressure.
My night nurse, John, a 71-year-
old Vietnam war veteran who’d been
struck twice by rattlesnakes, saved me
from going under the knife. In the ear-
ly morning, he found a pulse at the top
of my foot, a sign that I still had circu-
lation – enough to keep the surgeons
from operating.
It took four more days for me to
move from a bed to a chair. Two more
to stand up. And eight before the doc-
tors released me.IN SEPTEMBER, Garrett and I revis-
ited the site where I was bitten. In
search of closure, I wanted to know if
I’d done something wrong to deserve
my fate.
We were joined by Robert Hansen,
who edits the journalHerpetological
Review, and Rob Grasso, a Yosemite
park ecologist. The pair were dressed
in safari gear. Garrett and I strapped
on protective leg wear, as though we
were preparing to disarm a car bomb.
Hansen rolled his eyes at us. “They
don’t want to bite you,” he said.
Finally we reached the bridge.
“That’s my best guess,” Hansen said,
pointing to a shadowy overhang lo-
cated about 10 metres up a slab of
sloping granite, where he imagined
the snake’s den might be. When we
reached the ledge, I peered into a dark
crack but didn’t see any snakes.
Hansen was right – rattlesnakes
don’t want to bite people. They don’t
even want to be seen. Sometimes we
just step on a piece of bad luck. And
then get stung by a bee.ODOROUSLY EXPENSIVESometimes described as smelling like an open sewer, an
Indonesian variety of the pungent, spiky fruit known as durian
sold in Java recently for US$1000.REUTERS