An Idaho man is lucky to be alive after being bitten by a rattlesnake. He ended up needing 54 vials of antivenom.
"I got bit twice, and one of the bites, where it was was kind of a shallow, but the other one got my vein," Chris Howarth told SFGATE. "... I went inside. My wife thought I was joking."
He was bitten on May 26 after checking a waterline in his parents' backyard. The incident happened in California. His wife, Jenny Howarth, drove him to the hospital. But he was already having difficulty breathing. The hospital gave him antivenom, but the bite had gone straight into his bloodstream.
"I started feeling really sick," Chris said. "... My leg was really, really swollen, and as it was kind of a scary situation, I wasn't sure if I was going to pull through. At one point, I wrote some letters to my kids to make sure they had one last letter from Dad."
Rattlesnake Bit Idaho Man
It took days of antivenom to treat Howarth. Chris kept having recurring symptoms and developed a blood-clotting condition. In total he needed 36 doses of antivenom before being transfered to Stanford Hospital for an additional 18 antivenoms. The hospital transferred Chris because they had run out of antivenom.
Chris spent 12 days in the hospital.
Rais Vohra, medical director for the California Poison Control System's Fresno-Madera division, said the case was abnormal. "There's some people that need just a couple of vials, and then on the other end of the bell curve, there's some people that, depending on what their clinical course looks like, will need more than average," he told SFGATE.
"It just sounds like a really unfortunate case," he said.
Meanwhile, the couple said the hospitals have been great to them.
"We just want people to know how serious it can be," Jenny said. "I'm a nurse and I had no idea."
