05/04/2025
🐍 I got bitten by a Dugite snake and didn't die. 🐍
If you have been to one of my first aid courses, you will know how passionate I am about snakes... and by passionate, I mean petrified.
But, as fate would have it, I got bitten by a sneaky no-rope which led me on a 29-hour adventure as a patient, not a clinician.
Here's the story of what happened, my treatment and why I am back to normal... kind of.
It was 7:30pm at Ravensthorpe, where I'm currently contracted with Mt Cattlin Lithium Mine. I was taking a shortcut home from the bowls club, which took me through some scrubland to the football oval. I suddenly felt something hit my left calf muscle pretty hard. Then I heard some rustles in the leaves on the ground. My first thought was it was just a stick, but this stick hit different; there was a lot of force behind this one. It was enough for me to giggle and think, "I bet that was a snake." Again, let me remind you how scared I am of danger noodles.
I kept walking and made it halfway across the football oval before I felt a deep cramp and burning sensation right where the "stick" hit me. I stopped, turned on the torch on my phone, and looked at my leg... and froze. There were two clear puncture marks with drops of blood, and one had a clearish fluid dripping from it.
You don't need to be a seasoned paramedic to know what that meant. That "stick" got me good.
I got to a safe place and sat down. Thankfully, the on-call medic (and my good friend) was not far from my location and came and scooped me up. I was at the Raventhorpe Hospital ED with a pressure immobilisation bandage on within 15 minutes of being bitten. Talk about speedy drills.
I was now stuck in the WA Health Snakebite Management Guideline, which lasts for a minimum of 12 hours and requires a few blood tests to investigate whether envenomation had occurred. Fewer than 10% of snake bites result in envenomation, but I was starting to get a headache, and that cramp was still there.
Unfortunately, Ravensthorpe Hospital, like many regional health campuses, cannot perform the level of lab work needed. So RFDS was arranged to come and pick me up. Awesome.
Fast forward a few hours, two ambulance rides (that was weird being on the bed and not in the chair), and a flight with RFDS, and I was wheeled into a resus bay at Fiona Stanley Hospital. More blood was drawn, and it was time to take off that bandage.
Within 30 minutes of the bandage coming off, I started to feel pretty sick. Nausea, headache and pain in my groin all pointed to the worst—I had been envenomated. The bloods that came back from the lab also confirmed it. My D-dimer was elevated, as was my Creatinine Kinase (CK). However, my symptoms were mild, and the toxicology team wasn't overly concerned yet. Antivenom was on the cards, but more bloods and monitoring were needed first. I'm a fit dude, so they wanted to see if I could manage this myself.
My next lot of bloods were better, and there was a possibility of going home soon; I just needed one more set of good bloods, and I was clear. That didn't happen. The next ones were elevated too. There was some conjecture as to whether this was the result of envenomation or poor blood drawing technique, but with the earlier symptoms and timings of those symptoms, we weren't taking a chance.
At midnight the following day, I was released after returning two normal blood results and being asymptomatic. They made it very clear that the only reason they weren't keeping me till the morning was because I was a paramedic with a very clever and stern RN wife, and we knew what to look out for if it went pear shaped again. I personally think they were sick of my nagging and dad jokes.
So, what did we learn from this ordeal?
Well, for starters, it has done nothing to alleviate my fear of snakes. I might have PTSD.
But the real takeaway from this is how well that Pressure Immobilisation Technique (PIT) works. Putting that bandage on as quickly as we did saved me from a far worse outcome.
It is estimated that there are between 500 to 3000 snakebites annually in Australia, out of which 200-500 cases require antivenom. Snakebites are potentially lethal, but deaths are rare and are minimized with timely first aid, supportive care and antivenom in selected cases.
The struggle for me was I felt silly.
Up until the part where I got sick when the bandage came off, I had convinced myself it was just a stick, and I didn't need to be wasting all these resources to get me to Perth for investigation. I'm a good medic but a terrible patient.
Boy, was I glad I followed the process.
Thank you to all the team involved with getting me the help I needed.
P.S. I still hate snakes.
