Long before my world record-breaking days, my brother came running up the driveway with a lidded coffee tin. “A mole snake! I’ve got a mole snake”.
Being a snake lover, I stood up to use a metal blade to open the tin. And sure enough, he was in there: sleek, perfectly formed and beautiful. I reached in to stroke him, and let him know how much I love all snakes like him.
Wham! Recoil. Slithering. Two tiny blood spots appeared on my right index finger. My brother yelped and I pulled my hand back so fast, I tipped the tin on its side. But I had the sense to pick it up and close the lid just in time to keep the little fellow contained.
My knowledge of local snakes was fair, and believing the newly discovered mole snake had simply been telling me to leave him alone, I wiped my bloody finger and concentrated on ignoring the mild pain. But as I watched my brother looking at my finger, the throbbing worsened. Within 10 minutes, my finger had changed into a solid dark blue pipe, bloated and rigid.
This wasn’t a mole snake, I now realised. So what was it? By inspecting the shape of the back of its head with caution, it dawned on me this could be a cytotoxic species, not a cool mole snake. My heart began racing at the thought. Before I knew it, I had to sit down and my brother had rushed off to find my parents.
Immediately she saw my swollen discoloured finger, my mother ordered me into the car. Within minutes, the snake in its tin, my brother, mother and I were in a sanitised hospital room. Jars of snakes preserved in formaldehyde filled every shelf.
“Can you point to the one that bit you?”, the nurse asked. I opened the tin a crack, to which the nurse replied, “You’ve been bitten by a burrowing adder!”
Adder? Oh my gosh. Adders are cytotoxic, which means their venom begins to do nasty things to the cell tissue at the bite site. That explained why my finger looked more like a gangrenous sausage dipped in midnight blue ink.
The nurse hurriedly followed some basic medical procedures, and the next thing, we were on our way home. I released the snake in some thorny thickets along the way, while hearing the nurse’s voice in my mind, “You’re lucky you came in so fast; if you’d have waited another half an hour, we might have needed to take some drastic steps to stop the poison”.
Now, in 2012, when I think back, I wonder how things would have turned out if I’d had an Aspivenin from FlairPath. I think I could have slammed the lightweight syringe onto the bite site straight away and sucked almost all the venom out myself, on the spot. Imagine the difference this would have made to the treatment needed, had I not been able to get to medical care so fast? My spine tingles with the thought.
So from now on, as I go about planning world record activities in nations where snakes share the land with people, I‘ve decided to carry an Aspivenin from FlairPath. Of course, it’s a choice I made and feel comfortable with, and it’s what I think is right for me.
And the best news of all? It’s made from start to finish in France, by the French, according to French quality standards. And that, friends, means I believe I can trust this gadget when every minute counts.