I got bit by a Copperhead!!

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This morning's puffy leg picture!! Looking better!!🦵
 
Pearl said:
This morning's puffy leg picture!! Looking better!!🦵
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Now that you seem to be out of the woods... Here ya go! The first thread is on Sida, a plant i'm sure you have growing around buddy's pasture.. It's the first plant i'd grab for a snake bite. It even tastes good! Tincture is easy to make and can be stored 12-15yrs.

https://www.homesteadingforum.org/threads/sida.10579/
This thread details other plants commonly used to treat snake bite.

https://www.homesteadingforum.org/threads/snake-bite.10580/
 
Here in bama, below the hard freeze line, brown recluse survive outside. My shop and barns are full of them. It's second nature to check anything that hasn't been moved in a while. Odds are good there's one in it, on it or under it.

I've been bitten several times but thankfully... they don't envenomate in 70% of bites. I've seen the doc a couple times, all that can be done is an antibiotic. Was told it'd be obvious fairly quickly if it's a nasty bite.

I've had one bad bite. Knew when it happened, was moved livestock feed. Got me on my forearm, saw it! Within 15min it itched insanely, had red spot the size of half dollar. Started to swell after that, noticed a bump form, like small marble that was growing. There was no pain, just the itch.

It was the first time i tried to heal anything with just a plant. To my astonishment it worked. I used plantago virginica. I'd chew a leaf to break the cell structure then hold in on the bite with a bandaid. Fresh leaf every 4 hours.

It got as big as half a hen egg with in an hour, a big lump. Itched insanely all the time. Stayed that way. Began to go down by the next morning though. I had a 3 day headache, nasty and felt real bad. But 3 days later i could barely tell where i had been bitten. Plantain is good medicine.

Glad i didn't get a rotted sore and a chunk out of my body. B recluse usually leave nasty scars.
 
Where I kept my horse in Northwestern NJ, we had rattlers, copperheads and black bear. Always freaked me out when we'd be trailriding in the woods and we would smell cucumbers while picking berries. The rattlers always moved off with the ground vibration from the horses. The bears worried me a little bit for my trailmates--my horse was a retired racehorse and regularly outran the others. ;)

Here in suburban Jersey, most dangerous thing is drivers on their cellphones.
 
Peanut said:
Here in bama, below the hard freeze line, brown recluse survive outside. My shop and barns are full of them. It's second nature to check anything that hasn't been moved in a while. Odds are good there's one in it, on it or under it.

I've been bitten several times but thankfully... they don't envenomate in 70% of bites. I've seen the doc a couple times, all that can be done is an antibiotic. Was told it'd be obvious fairly quickly if it's a nasty bite.

I've had one bad bite. Knew when it happened, was moved livestock feed. Got me on my forearm, saw it! Within 15min it itched insanely, had red spot the size of half dollar. Started to swell after that, noticed a bump form, like small marble that was growing. There was no pain, just the itch.

It was the first time i tried to heal anything with just a plant. To my astonishment it worked. I used plantago virginica. I'd chew a leaf to break the cell structure then hold in on the bite with a bandaid. Fresh leaf every 4 hours.

It got as big as half a hen egg with in an hour, a big lump. Itched insanely all the time. Stayed that way. Began to go down by the next morning though. I had a 3 day headache, nasty and felt real bad. But 3 days later i could barely tell where i had been bitten. Plantain is good medicine.

Glad i didn't get a rotted sore and a chunk out of my body. B recluse usually leave nasty scars.
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I got bit last year by a brown recluse, left a dime size scar that won't tan! Got the size of a large marble for two days, had a headache and dry mouth. Itchy, burning feeling. Took many months to heal. Was constantly an oozy mess.
 
In the US they have discovered that the pit vipers here have a mixture of hemo and neuro toxin in the venom mix. The hemo part on pearl depends on a deeper injection her reactions saved her there, the Neuro only needs a scratch to even be partial effective as she is attesting to.The amount of the toxins also depend on the mood and how recently it may have just had a meal cause it not having a full venom load available.
So as others are worried about and rightly so you may have had an grandfather fully bitten by the much feared southern copperheadedwaterrattler and he could have drank the turpentine peed upwind off the porch and rubbed axel grease on the site an had almost no ill effects. It does not mean it was a cure, it just seemed to work at the time.

PS .... The Hog nosed snake has venom and rear fangs also , so watch out.
 
ssonb said:
In the US they have discovered that the pit vipers here have a mixture of hemo and neuro toxin in the venom mix. The hemo part on pearl depends on a deeper injection her reactions saved her there, the Neuro only needs a scratch to even be partial effective as she is attesting to.
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Yes, neurotoxins affect the nervous system, cytotoxins affect cells and hemotoxins effect blood and organs.

The mojave green rattlesnakes in the high deserts of Central California are the same way. My buddies and I would have to get drunk before we went after them.
 
Pearl said:
The leg looks better, feeling decent this morning!
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Glad you are feeling better, and the leg is improving. I am still ready to lecture you like a Dutch Uncle for not going to the hospital.
 
Wow just catching up and saw this! Glad you are ok @Pearl and everything turned out ok. Also glad to see everyone gave you a lecture about going to the ER and I didn't have to 😫

If you get any blisters, or the surrounding skin feels like rice krispies (kind of crackly when you touch it), please go to the ER right away. That is a sign of necrotizing fasciitis which can develop days later after a puncture wound in the skin.
 
Frodo said:
That snake with out the close up
He is about 6 or 7’ longView attachment 117553
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Copperhead? I've never seen one in real life. I've seen plenty of others. I was fishing in a lake in Tennessee once that there was a snake in the water, along the shore line. I later read that snakes in water can also be dangerous.
 
Caribou said:
Is this where we drop our favourite snake recipe?
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LOL. Reminds me that the Thai word for snake is "ngu" and we used to go to our favorite Thai place and joke that we wanted cow pod ngu (fried rice with snake).

Ah, some people from 47! That's when my dad was born.

Pearl, I'm glad you're feeling better and that you have a sense of humor about all this.

Weedy, the copperheads have beautiful markings and usually are not terribly aggressive. The one that bit Pearl must have been startled & felt really threatened. We have a lot of them around here. One day a guy was over to replace the satellite dish for our internet & brought his kid. His kid actually stepped on a copperhead (that was curled up trying to hide) and it didn't strike. As an aside, my dad shared a fox hole with a cobra while in Vietnam. The soldiers ignored it and it ignored them. It had burrowed into a hole in the "wall" of the trench and kept to itself.

I'm reminded that I really need to go out and cut the grass and weeds back so there aren't places for the venomous snakes to hide. The cottonmouths can be extremely aggressive.
 
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