SAMPSON INDEPENDENT (N Carolina) 06 July 06 Snake-bite victim home and recovering (Dave Frank)

The 75-year-old woman who was airlifted from Clinton to Chapel Hill after being bitten by a rattlesnake has been released from UNC Hospitals and is recovering in her Sampson County home.

Annie Rouse, of 805 Wright Bridge Road, was admitted to Sampson Regional Medical Center the evening of June 22 and administered 12 vials of anti-venom before being transferred to Chapel Hill a few hours later. She was released June 28.

“Ooo, was I sick,” Rouse said. “I couldn't only eat but a bite.”

Rouse was tending the mums in her garden when an 18-inch pygmy rattlesnake bit her on the right wrist. She then quartered the animal with a shovel and put the pieces in a bucket.

“I didn't see it,” she said. “Otherwise, I would have killed him from square one.”

The first person to respond to Rouse's injury was her daughter, Yonna Buchanan.

“I heard her hollering,” Buchanan, who lives next door, said. “I just slammed on some clothes.”

Buchanan loaded both Rouse and the bucket of snake remains into her 1997 black Nissan to bring to the doctors at Sampson Regional.

But they only got a few miles down the road, about 13 miles south of Clinton, when Rouse began losing feeling in her lips and head.

“That little rascal was so full of poison it was pitiful,” Rouse said.

“I was hauling buggy,” Buchanan said. “But she was already passing out.”

Then, as Buchanan talked with 911 dispatch and tried to arrange a place rescue crews could intercept them, the two were pulled over by Corporal Bobby Smith of the Sampson County Sheriff's Department. Buchanan said she initially refused to pull over, but the dispatch operator insisted.

“You have the woman with the snakebite?” Smith asked her when she stopped.

Buchanan said she did.

“Follow me,” he said.

An emergency crew took over near the Dairy Queen on U.S. 701, but dispatch called Smith again two hours later. The hospital needed more of the anti-venom, Crofab, and they needed someone to get more of it from Duplin General Hospital in Kenansville.

“He top-gunned it to get it,” Buchanan said. “He'll never know what I feel for him.”

“I'm just glad she's all right,” Smith said.

But there were complications. Rouse had been taking a blood thinner ever since she had a heart attack two years before, and one of Crofab's effects is to thin the blood.

Doctors were also having troubles finding somewhere for her to be airlifted. Beds were full, helicopters were busy but, finally, a Duke helicopter and a UNC bed freed up.

“It was like everything was in our way,” Buchanan said.

When she arrived at Chapel Hill, though, the medicine and two pints of blood began to stabilize her.

She said she knew she'd be OK when she realized where she was.

Since Rouse returned home last Wednesday at 7:30 p.m., Buchanan, a nurse and Buchanan's daughter, Pandora Rackley, have taken turns looking after Rouse.

Rouse, who used to run an upholstery shop in Clinton, said she may not be as active as she was before her heart attack but is getting stronger by the day.
Snake-bite victim home and recovering

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