THE REPOSITORY (Canton, Ohio) 06 November 05 Viper puts couple on a race for anti-venom (Diana Rossetti)
The bite of a poisonous viper cut short what should have been a leisurely 19-day tour of Bolivia, Peru and the Galapagos Islands for Chuck and Ginny West of Plain Township.
Ginny is extremely fortunate it did not cut short her life.
The Wests — Chuck is a retired Timken Co. steel division president — and friends Larry and Nancy Hoover left Sept. 7 for Bolivia. Days later, they arrived at a lodge near the Incan ruins of Machu Picchu in Peru. After using a guide the first day, they decided to return the following morning.
“We got to the top, and it was absolutely glorious,” Ginny recalled.
As they began their descent along a five-foot wall of stone, Ginny “felt something slicing my finger.”
Two holes on the little finger of her left hand were trickling blood. A local guide accompanying other tourists asked if she’d seen the snake that bit her, and soon a coiled viper was spotted nearby.
“He said I had one hour to get down to the lodge to get the anti-venom medicine. But from the lodge, you had to go down the rest of the serpentine mountain, and we knew it was not going to happen,” Ginny continued.
Peruvian workers heard the commotion. One ran for a stretcher and another threw Ginny on his back and began running down the mountain. She arrived at the lodge three or four minutes shy of the hour that could have meant her death.
There was a single dose of anti-venom serum at the lodge, but it was not nearly enough to save her.
Travel to Machu Picchu is by foot or rail. Carrying her on a stretcher, the men raced to a village clinic. Personnel there did what they could, but had no serum and urged her to take the train to another town where an ambulance would be waiting.
But the ambulance was not there when they arrived.
A Spanish-speaking nurse told villagers they could not wait the 20 minutes for it to arrive. A station wagon was found to drive her to another clinic. By then, the venom was attacking Ginny’s lungs.
“Like the proverbial ton of bricks,” she said. “It was excruciating.” Twice, she lost consciousness.
That clinic had no anti-venom serum. Now Ginny’s kidneys had shut down, and her hand was swelling larger and larger by the minute.
They were trapped for the night because planes could not fly in or out of the village in darkness. The next morning, the couple was flown to a Lima clinic where a Johns Hopkins-trained physician awaited. Scouring the city for the anti-venom serum, he was able to locate 10 units that he administered over four days. His staff worked around the clock to stabilize their American patient.
Finally, her Peruvian physician released her, and she was flown in a medical evacuation aircraft to the Cleveland Clinic in Naples, Fla.
“In Florida, I was in the ICU for two-and-a-half weeks while they worked on cleansing my blood,” Ginny recounted. Eventually, both lungs were tapped to remove fluids that had built up around them, hindering her breathing.
Following a brief stay at Aultman Hospital and a week at its transitional care center, Ginny returned home Oct. 19. She continues physical therapy to strengthen her legs.
“I just keep coming back to I’m just so blessed that there were so many good people and prayer chains,” she said, adding her gratitude for a husband of 48 years forced to make decisions in nearly impossible situations. The couple’s three sons also flew in to be with her.
Recounting her surgery last week for amputation of part of her finger was almost an afterthought looking back on the ordeal.
“I guess I’m lucky,” she said. “It could have ended differently.”
Viper puts couple on a race for anti-venom

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