Myra Ricouard experienced every gardener’s nightmare recently when a rattlesnake bit her while she was pulling weeds.
Ricouard is OK now — the incident happened Oct. 1 — but she’s leery about returning to yard work.
“I’m not a gardener anymore,” she said.
Ricouard was wearing a pair of rubber dishwashing gloves while weeding the back edge of a metal shed at her property on Della Drive northwest of Summit.
“I was pulling all this grass,” she said, pointing to the spot. “When I got right there, he got me.”
A small opening under the concrete slab suggests the snake may have had a den there.
“It stung me like fire,” said Ricouard.
The fangs penetrated her right wrist and she jumped back.
“When I went back to see what got me, he was coiled up,” she said.
Her husband Ernest was on the back side of the property mowing grass, so Myra scooped up the snake in a shovel and carried it out to him.
Ernest let go of one of the handles to look back, and the machine veered off to the right. He got control of it and went to see what the commotion was about.
What he saw was a small timber rattler, 12 to 16 inches long and an inch thick with just one rattle, still coiled on the shovel blade.
Ernest fetched a jar, held the snake down with the shovel and put the jar by its head. The snake slithered into the jar, and Ernest screwed the lid on.
“I could have killed it. I thought it would be more interesting to take a live snake to the hospital,” he said.
“I called 911, told them we were coming to the hospital with a rattlesnake bite.”
He was ready to go, but Myra wasn’t. After all, she was dirty from gardening.
“She changed her clothes, washed her face,” Ernest said with a grin. “If that had been a big snake, it would have killed her.”
He estimates he made the 14-mile drive to Southwest Mississippi Regional Medical Center in seven minutes, then admits that may be a bit of exaggeration.
Myra, meanwhile, was feeling dizzy, and her wrist was swelling.
By the time she reached the hospital she was shaky, jerking even, with blurred vision and tightness in her throat.
Medical personnel administered an IV with antibiotic and water to dilute the poison and gave her a tetanus booster shot. They didn’t give her antivenin, which is extremely expensive and can cause serious side effects. It’s typically used only if symptoms become severe.
The hospital kept Myra under observation for four hours and sent the snake to the Center for Disease Control to test for contaminants in the saliva.
Her symptoms didn’t get worse, so evidently the snake didn’t inject a full load of venom.
A month later, the bite marks are barely visible on her wrist.
There was no question the snake was a timber rattler. Myra recognized it from photos on the Enterprise-Journal Outdoors Page this summer. And a cell phone photo shows the telltale tan body and black chevron markings.
Nor was this the family’s first encounter with poisonous snakes.
Ernest’s sister Dolores Jutierrez said a rattlesnake bit her husband on the finger and it remained swollen for the rest of his life.
Ernest said a rattlesnake bit his uncle in the leg through a knee boot in Plaquemine Parish, La. He went to the hospital and recovered, but a couple months later when he put the boots back on, he got sick again and had to go back to the hospital.
After the same thing happened a third time, he discovered “the fangs had broken off from the snake’s mouth and were stuck in that boot and had a residue of venom,” Ernest said.
That squares with advice Myra received at the hospital to destroy the glove she had been wearing to prevent further contamination.
Myra remains spooked by the incident, and worries that snakes could be anywhere. And well they could be.
Since the Ricouards moved to the rural property after Hurricane Katrina flooded their St. Bernard Parish, La., home, Ernest has had numerous encounters with snakes, including a pair of blue runners, a 4-5-foot long rat snake that fell out of a tree, and a rat snake lodged in the grooves of the house’s brick wall.
But they don’t bother him. He doesn’t even wear boots when working around the place.
“This is what I wear all the time,” he said, gesturing to shorts and Crocs worn without socks.
