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| Go ahead and do it, I'm waiting with my finger on the shutter release... |
As a wildlife photographer, I have been spoiled as a result of having lived in the Pacific Northwest for over a decade now. I haven't been taking photographs that entire time, I've only been photographing wildlife for a few years, but I've been living in Seattle the entire time I've been photographing wildlife. I grew up on the East Coast and I spent a lot of time in the woods as a child-as did most of my friends. You get used to the nuisances you face on a regular basis-poison ivy, mosquitoes, snakes, chiggers-you name it. Avoiding these things becomes second nature to you, until you've been away for many years and it's no longer automatic.
My parents live in Deltaville, Virginia, not far from the Chesapeake Bay. Their home is situated in the woods near a river and it's teeming with wildlife. The end of June, I flew from Seattle to Virginia because my mom's cancer, which had been in remission for over a year, returned with a vengeance. The cancer had metastasized to her left lung and the tumor was entwined with her pulmonary artery-a very dangerous situation. Unfortunately, because of the tumor's size and location, the only viable option was for surgeons to remove her entire left lung. She was scheduled to have a pneumonectomy, which was the only real hope of saving her life. It's a complex surgery that carries a lot of risks and my family and I were all very concerned.
It had been very hot and humid during my visit and there hadn't been much leisure time due to circumstances and the oppressive heat and humidity-something else I am no longer used to now that I have been living in Seattle for so long. On July 5th, my parents had gone to do some shopping and I hadn't really been out into the woods with my camera since my arrival, so I thought I could use the distraction. Because it was so hot, I thought I would just take a quick walk through the woods, where it was shady, and see if I could get some photographs of a pair of Cardinals I had seen. Because of the heat, I knew I wouldn't stay out long and left with just my camera and my cell phone. I did leave a note on the kitchen counter explaining that I was out in the woods in case my parents returned and wondered where I was.
I didn't see any other people as I headed towards the nature trail not far from my parent's house and the birds were mostly quiet because it was early afternoon. I knew I wasn't going to see much wildlife at that time of day, but I thought a short walk through the woods might distract me from everything that was weighing on my mind. I couldn't have been more right about that. By the time I headed into the woods on the trail, I was covered in sweat and felt like I was in an oven.
I had already decided that it was too hot and that I was going to cut my walk short when I saw a pair of Cardinals sitting quietly together in a tree about thirty feet away. I had been walking very quietly in hopes of not spooking any wildlife that I might be lucky enough to encounter and the birds didn't seem overly concerned with my presence. I turned to face the birds while looking through my camera's viewfinder and zoomed in tightly. I exhaled and steadied myself in hopes of getting a nice sharp shot of the Cardinals. I widened my stance slightly and was getting ready to take the shot when - WHAM - I felt a strange and sudden pain in my right foot and nearly dropped my camera. I got control of the camera and looked down to see what had happened. I didn't know if I had stepped on a branch that had snapped back and hit me or what.
I looked down and saw blood pouring from the outside of my right foot. The initial pain felt somewhat like a bad electrical shock, but the sharp pain didn't subside. I couldn't figure out what I could have done that could have caused this type of injury. I was on flat and stable ground with no obvious obstacles. There were dead branches and leaf litter all over the sandy trail, but nothing outwardly dangerous or menacing. I turned to try to walk back towards my parent's house and when I put weight on my right foot, there was an enormous shooting pain that caused me to pull my foot back up off the ground reflexively. So, there I stood in the middle of the woods in over 100 degree heat with what felt like a rather serious injury. I shook my head in disbelief and tried to see the outside of my right foot to see if something was puncturing me. I didn't see anything obvious, but there was a lot of blood, so I couldn't see exactly what the wound looked like. I sat down on the trail pulling my right foot in and holding it to the side to try to see what I had done to it. This wasn't very helpful and I didn't have anything with me to clean the blood away to give me a better look. There were homes not too far from where I was and good friends of my parents lived in them. I shouted to see if anyone could hear me and got no response. Everyone had their windows and doors closed with their air conditioners running because of the heat. Awesome.
There was actually a chair sitting at the edge of the trail I was on about 20 feet away and I mostly hopped my way over to it and sat down. I had sweat pouring off of me, blood pouring out of me, and I felt woozy. I had never been so happy to sit in a plastic chair. I found out a few days later that my father is actually the one who had put that chair there because he liked to sit and read and watch the birds. I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket thinking I'd call my dad in case they had returned home to see if he could come help me. I looked at the display screen and saw a message that you don't want to see when you are in trouble and need help - "Searching For Signal" There was what looked like a little rotating satellite dish on the screen and I saw that I had no signal whatsoever. I just shook my head as I contemplated my predicament and was somewhat astounded by how badly things were going. I held my cell ph0ne up in the air as if I could magically link in to some stray scrap of signal so that I could call for help. Nope. Nothing. I laughed at how shitty it was for this to be happening at this particular moment and I said "can you hear me NOW?" like that guy from the Verizon commercials. This wasn't a Verizon phone, it was a Sprint phone, but it seemed appropriate anyway. Great.
The situation wasn't improving and I knew I had to get back to my parent's house. I got up and began limping my way in that direction. I grabbed on to trees and would go a few feet at a time and then stop and rest. The pain in my foot was spreading up my leg and I wondered if I had somehow damaged a nerve or what. A walk that normally would have taken a few minutes ended up taking about a half hour. I finally reached my parent's house and headed for the front door. When I opened the door, I must have looked pretty bad because my mom's eyes got really wide as she sat forward on the edge of the couch and said "what happened?" I felt the cool air conditioning and was so relieved to be back inside. I limped over to the couch and put my bloody camera on the side table as I collapsed on the couch. "I don't know - something stung me or stabbed me - I'm not sure." My mom looked at my bloody foot and said "You don't bleed like that from a sting." I just sat there cooling off for a minute and then I got up and limped over to the kitchen to get a paper towel to wipe my foot off.
I had been wearing a pair of flip flop-like sandals that I wear when I'm on my parent's boat because it makes no difference if they get wet and you can just hose them off if you get them dirty. They are cool and relatively indestructible, which was why I had worn them to begin with. I was walking on relatively flat and sandy soil, so it had made sense for a walk that was only going to last a short period of time. I slipped my right foot out and the whole thing was full of blood. I got the paper towel wet and started cleaning the blood off of my foot. Once I got it clean enough, there were two very distinct puncture marks staring back at me. My jaw fell open and my mom said, "could you have been bitten by a snake?!" Oh shit. SNAKES! We don't have any venomous snakes in Seattle and in the midst of the worry about my mom's cancer and other things, that had completely fallen off of my radar screen.
As an EMT, I scrutinized the puncture marks and drifted firmly into denial. No way. I would have seen the snake, right? There was no snake. Was there? I stared at the puncture marks and noticed the bruising setting in around one of them. Whatever had punctured me had clearly punctured a vein, which is why it had bled so much initially. Nice shot. I noted the discoloration and the time on the clock and knew to watch for spreading. It was the Monday after the 4th of July and the local doctor's office was closed. There is no hospital in close proximity to my parent's home-it's a very rural area-beautiful but isolated. I contemplated my options. Okay, it couldn't have been a rattlesnake in that area and I would have been paralyzed by that time if it had been. If it were a snakebite, it had to be a Southern Copperhead. Not ideal, but not the end of the world either. It wasn't likely to kill me. I took some benedryl and thought about it. My dad came in the front door and made his way to where I was in the kitchen and looked at my foot. "I think you got bitten by a snake, kid." I once again declared why this seemed so far fetched to me since I had never seen the snake.
I weighed various scenarios in my head. I knew if I went to the hospital that I was going to be kept overnight at the very least. That was just about at the very bottom of the list of things that I deemed acceptable. The bruising didn't seem to be spreading very rapidly and I started to wonder if I had received what is referred to as a "dry bite". About 25% of the time, Copperheads don't inject venom when they bite a person. That would work nicely with my denial. We decided to watch it and to go to the hospital if it began to spread or if I started having other problems. Aside from how painful it was, it didn't seem like the end of the world. There is a nurse that lives beside my parents and a medical helicopter pilot lives next door. Somehow it didn't feel overly dangerous to ride it out for a bit. We looked at it every 10-15 minutes for many hours and came to the conclusion that it wasn't going to kill me.
Ordinarily, if a snake bite is going to be really bad, that will become evident in the hours that follow the bite. In my case, it developed more slowly, but continued to get steadily worse. The bruising spread over my foot and the pain got so bad that I couldn't stand it anymore. My dad called his doctor's office the next day , which was about 10 minutes away and they were able to fit me in. They ran several blood tests due to the hemotoxic nature of the Copperhead's venom and I was put on antibiotics and pain medication. Copperheads are pit vipers and their venom causes clotting problems in bite victims. I was told that I was not to take Aspirin, Advil, or any NSAIDs for the time being and my prothrombin time was at an acceptable level at that time. They felt that I could monitor myself for compartment syndrome since I am an EMT and told me to go to the ER if it got worse. They made some phone calls and discussed my situation with other medical professionals and agreed that antivenin probably wouldn't be that useful for me.**
In the days that followed, I was sick and miserable. I was nauseated frequently and vomited more times than I care to remember. My foot remained extremely painful and I got around on crutches most of the time. When we took my mom to the hospital for her surgery to check in, one of the nurses thought I was a patient and chastised me when she saw me drinking at the water fountain in the hallway. She barked at me, "HEY! You can't have anything to drink!!" and I turned to see her staring at me. "I can't?....wait, I'm not a patient, I'm here with my mom." I saw her looking at my wrists for those hospital bracelets. "Well, you sure LOOK like a patient!" We both laughed and I mentioned that I felt like a patient, but I wasn't one. Hanging out in the ICU all week wasn't a bad place for me with all things considered.
My mom's surgery was a success and she is living her life with one lung at this point and still fighting her cancer. She has completed four rounds of intense chemotherapy and has two more to go. It feels like it has been a long and treacherous six months. That which doesn't kill you makes you stronger, right? My family should be pretty damned strong by now. In case you've ever wondered where the "9lives" part of "9livesimages" came from, it's a joke. I've had a few mishaps along my journey in life and friends of mine joke that I have 9 lives. Now you know.
Overall, it took a couple of months for my foot to be well enough for me to be out walking around with my camera again. There is some lingering nerve damage and pain in the knee and hip of that leg off and on. In the end, I am reminded that if I am out with my camera in the woods in a region with venomous snakes, I need to be wearing boots. The boots I had with me had canvas in the area of the bite, so they may or may not have protected me. It may have helped. I'm thankful that I live somewhere without venomous snakes. It's a luxury that I hadn't contemplated during the thousands of hours that I have spent photographing wildlife. I don't blame the snake for what happened to me. It was just a freak accident. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time and I had no idea that the snake was there. If I had known, I likely would have avoided the bite completely. I try not to disturb the wildlife that I photograph and have respect for all species and that includes venomous snakes. I don't condone killing venomous snakes and believe that they play a very important role in the ecosystem. I think that for the time being, I'd prefer to see them on the Discovery Channel and not in person. I nearly fell into Lake Washington late in September when a Garter Snake zipped past my foot. It was an automatic reflex and I had to laugh after it happened. I guess I'm still a little jumpy.
**If you are bitten by a venomous snake, go to the emergency room. Never put ice on a venomous snake bite-you can cause greater tissue damage and make things worse. Try to remain calm and get medical assistance. In the end, I would have benefited from the CroFab antivenin that is given to snakebite victims. Hindsight is always 20/20, isn't it? Somewhere between 6,000-8,000 people are bitten by venomous snakes in the United States each year and approximately 12 of the bites are fatal. Most fatal bites come from Rattlesnakes, another kind of pit viper. People do occasionally die from Copperhead bites, so don't risk it.
My parents live in Deltaville, Virginia, not far from the Chesapeake Bay. Their home is situated in the woods near a river and it's teeming with wildlife. The end of June, I flew from Seattle to Virginia because my mom's cancer, which had been in remission for over a year, returned with a vengeance. The cancer had metastasized to her left lung and the tumor was entwined with her pulmonary artery-a very dangerous situation. Unfortunately, because of the tumor's size and location, the only viable option was for surgeons to remove her entire left lung. She was scheduled to have a pneumonectomy, which was the only real hope of saving her life. It's a complex surgery that carries a lot of risks and my family and I were all very concerned.
It had been very hot and humid during my visit and there hadn't been much leisure time due to circumstances and the oppressive heat and humidity-something else I am no longer used to now that I have been living in Seattle for so long. On July 5th, my parents had gone to do some shopping and I hadn't really been out into the woods with my camera since my arrival, so I thought I could use the distraction. Because it was so hot, I thought I would just take a quick walk through the woods, where it was shady, and see if I could get some photographs of a pair of Cardinals I had seen. Because of the heat, I knew I wouldn't stay out long and left with just my camera and my cell phone. I did leave a note on the kitchen counter explaining that I was out in the woods in case my parents returned and wondered where I was.
I didn't see any other people as I headed towards the nature trail not far from my parent's house and the birds were mostly quiet because it was early afternoon. I knew I wasn't going to see much wildlife at that time of day, but I thought a short walk through the woods might distract me from everything that was weighing on my mind. I couldn't have been more right about that. By the time I headed into the woods on the trail, I was covered in sweat and felt like I was in an oven.
I had already decided that it was too hot and that I was going to cut my walk short when I saw a pair of Cardinals sitting quietly together in a tree about thirty feet away. I had been walking very quietly in hopes of not spooking any wildlife that I might be lucky enough to encounter and the birds didn't seem overly concerned with my presence. I turned to face the birds while looking through my camera's viewfinder and zoomed in tightly. I exhaled and steadied myself in hopes of getting a nice sharp shot of the Cardinals. I widened my stance slightly and was getting ready to take the shot when - WHAM - I felt a strange and sudden pain in my right foot and nearly dropped my camera. I got control of the camera and looked down to see what had happened. I didn't know if I had stepped on a branch that had snapped back and hit me or what.
I looked down and saw blood pouring from the outside of my right foot. The initial pain felt somewhat like a bad electrical shock, but the sharp pain didn't subside. I couldn't figure out what I could have done that could have caused this type of injury. I was on flat and stable ground with no obvious obstacles. There were dead branches and leaf litter all over the sandy trail, but nothing outwardly dangerous or menacing. I turned to try to walk back towards my parent's house and when I put weight on my right foot, there was an enormous shooting pain that caused me to pull my foot back up off the ground reflexively. So, there I stood in the middle of the woods in over 100 degree heat with what felt like a rather serious injury. I shook my head in disbelief and tried to see the outside of my right foot to see if something was puncturing me. I didn't see anything obvious, but there was a lot of blood, so I couldn't see exactly what the wound looked like. I sat down on the trail pulling my right foot in and holding it to the side to try to see what I had done to it. This wasn't very helpful and I didn't have anything with me to clean the blood away to give me a better look. There were homes not too far from where I was and good friends of my parents lived in them. I shouted to see if anyone could hear me and got no response. Everyone had their windows and doors closed with their air conditioners running because of the heat. Awesome.
There was actually a chair sitting at the edge of the trail I was on about 20 feet away and I mostly hopped my way over to it and sat down. I had sweat pouring off of me, blood pouring out of me, and I felt woozy. I had never been so happy to sit in a plastic chair. I found out a few days later that my father is actually the one who had put that chair there because he liked to sit and read and watch the birds. I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket thinking I'd call my dad in case they had returned home to see if he could come help me. I looked at the display screen and saw a message that you don't want to see when you are in trouble and need help - "Searching For Signal" There was what looked like a little rotating satellite dish on the screen and I saw that I had no signal whatsoever. I just shook my head as I contemplated my predicament and was somewhat astounded by how badly things were going. I held my cell ph0ne up in the air as if I could magically link in to some stray scrap of signal so that I could call for help. Nope. Nothing. I laughed at how shitty it was for this to be happening at this particular moment and I said "can you hear me NOW?" like that guy from the Verizon commercials. This wasn't a Verizon phone, it was a Sprint phone, but it seemed appropriate anyway. Great.
The situation wasn't improving and I knew I had to get back to my parent's house. I got up and began limping my way in that direction. I grabbed on to trees and would go a few feet at a time and then stop and rest. The pain in my foot was spreading up my leg and I wondered if I had somehow damaged a nerve or what. A walk that normally would have taken a few minutes ended up taking about a half hour. I finally reached my parent's house and headed for the front door. When I opened the door, I must have looked pretty bad because my mom's eyes got really wide as she sat forward on the edge of the couch and said "what happened?" I felt the cool air conditioning and was so relieved to be back inside. I limped over to the couch and put my bloody camera on the side table as I collapsed on the couch. "I don't know - something stung me or stabbed me - I'm not sure." My mom looked at my bloody foot and said "You don't bleed like that from a sting." I just sat there cooling off for a minute and then I got up and limped over to the kitchen to get a paper towel to wipe my foot off.
I had been wearing a pair of flip flop-like sandals that I wear when I'm on my parent's boat because it makes no difference if they get wet and you can just hose them off if you get them dirty. They are cool and relatively indestructible, which was why I had worn them to begin with. I was walking on relatively flat and sandy soil, so it had made sense for a walk that was only going to last a short period of time. I slipped my right foot out and the whole thing was full of blood. I got the paper towel wet and started cleaning the blood off of my foot. Once I got it clean enough, there were two very distinct puncture marks staring back at me. My jaw fell open and my mom said, "could you have been bitten by a snake?!" Oh shit. SNAKES! We don't have any venomous snakes in Seattle and in the midst of the worry about my mom's cancer and other things, that had completely fallen off of my radar screen.
As an EMT, I scrutinized the puncture marks and drifted firmly into denial. No way. I would have seen the snake, right? There was no snake. Was there? I stared at the puncture marks and noticed the bruising setting in around one of them. Whatever had punctured me had clearly punctured a vein, which is why it had bled so much initially. Nice shot. I noted the discoloration and the time on the clock and knew to watch for spreading. It was the Monday after the 4th of July and the local doctor's office was closed. There is no hospital in close proximity to my parent's home-it's a very rural area-beautiful but isolated. I contemplated my options. Okay, it couldn't have been a rattlesnake in that area and I would have been paralyzed by that time if it had been. If it were a snakebite, it had to be a Southern Copperhead. Not ideal, but not the end of the world either. It wasn't likely to kill me. I took some benedryl and thought about it. My dad came in the front door and made his way to where I was in the kitchen and looked at my foot. "I think you got bitten by a snake, kid." I once again declared why this seemed so far fetched to me since I had never seen the snake.
I weighed various scenarios in my head. I knew if I went to the hospital that I was going to be kept overnight at the very least. That was just about at the very bottom of the list of things that I deemed acceptable. The bruising didn't seem to be spreading very rapidly and I started to wonder if I had received what is referred to as a "dry bite". About 25% of the time, Copperheads don't inject venom when they bite a person. That would work nicely with my denial. We decided to watch it and to go to the hospital if it began to spread or if I started having other problems. Aside from how painful it was, it didn't seem like the end of the world. There is a nurse that lives beside my parents and a medical helicopter pilot lives next door. Somehow it didn't feel overly dangerous to ride it out for a bit. We looked at it every 10-15 minutes for many hours and came to the conclusion that it wasn't going to kill me.
Ordinarily, if a snake bite is going to be really bad, that will become evident in the hours that follow the bite. In my case, it developed more slowly, but continued to get steadily worse. The bruising spread over my foot and the pain got so bad that I couldn't stand it anymore. My dad called his doctor's office the next day , which was about 10 minutes away and they were able to fit me in. They ran several blood tests due to the hemotoxic nature of the Copperhead's venom and I was put on antibiotics and pain medication. Copperheads are pit vipers and their venom causes clotting problems in bite victims. I was told that I was not to take Aspirin, Advil, or any NSAIDs for the time being and my prothrombin time was at an acceptable level at that time. They felt that I could monitor myself for compartment syndrome since I am an EMT and told me to go to the ER if it got worse. They made some phone calls and discussed my situation with other medical professionals and agreed that antivenin probably wouldn't be that useful for me.**
In the days that followed, I was sick and miserable. I was nauseated frequently and vomited more times than I care to remember. My foot remained extremely painful and I got around on crutches most of the time. When we took my mom to the hospital for her surgery to check in, one of the nurses thought I was a patient and chastised me when she saw me drinking at the water fountain in the hallway. She barked at me, "HEY! You can't have anything to drink!!" and I turned to see her staring at me. "I can't?....wait, I'm not a patient, I'm here with my mom." I saw her looking at my wrists for those hospital bracelets. "Well, you sure LOOK like a patient!" We both laughed and I mentioned that I felt like a patient, but I wasn't one. Hanging out in the ICU all week wasn't a bad place for me with all things considered.
My mom's surgery was a success and she is living her life with one lung at this point and still fighting her cancer. She has completed four rounds of intense chemotherapy and has two more to go. It feels like it has been a long and treacherous six months. That which doesn't kill you makes you stronger, right? My family should be pretty damned strong by now. In case you've ever wondered where the "9lives" part of "9livesimages" came from, it's a joke. I've had a few mishaps along my journey in life and friends of mine joke that I have 9 lives. Now you know.
Overall, it took a couple of months for my foot to be well enough for me to be out walking around with my camera again. There is some lingering nerve damage and pain in the knee and hip of that leg off and on. In the end, I am reminded that if I am out with my camera in the woods in a region with venomous snakes, I need to be wearing boots. The boots I had with me had canvas in the area of the bite, so they may or may not have protected me. It may have helped. I'm thankful that I live somewhere without venomous snakes. It's a luxury that I hadn't contemplated during the thousands of hours that I have spent photographing wildlife. I don't blame the snake for what happened to me. It was just a freak accident. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time and I had no idea that the snake was there. If I had known, I likely would have avoided the bite completely. I try not to disturb the wildlife that I photograph and have respect for all species and that includes venomous snakes. I don't condone killing venomous snakes and believe that they play a very important role in the ecosystem. I think that for the time being, I'd prefer to see them on the Discovery Channel and not in person. I nearly fell into Lake Washington late in September when a Garter Snake zipped past my foot. It was an automatic reflex and I had to laugh after it happened. I guess I'm still a little jumpy.
**If you are bitten by a venomous snake, go to the emergency room. Never put ice on a venomous snake bite-you can cause greater tissue damage and make things worse. Try to remain calm and get medical assistance. In the end, I would have benefited from the CroFab antivenin that is given to snakebite victims. Hindsight is always 20/20, isn't it? Somewhere between 6,000-8,000 people are bitten by venomous snakes in the United States each year and approximately 12 of the bites are fatal. Most fatal bites come from Rattlesnakes, another kind of pit viper. People do occasionally die from Copperhead bites, so don't risk it.
