TIMES-LEADER (Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania) 15 August 03 OK, so she's no snake charmer - Laflin woman who tried to help Hanover Twp. man move snake ends up bit by a copperhead (Lane Filler)

Not normally a drinker, Jessica Butts had two cocktails late Wednesday night in the Lee Park section of Hanover Township and got snakebit. Literally. By a poisonous copperhead. Seriously.

"There was an older guy out on his porch antagonizing this snake with a broom at about 1 a.m.," Butts, 26, of Laflin, said. "I guess he was just trying to get it off his porch, but he told me it was a garter snake and I said I would move it for him.

"I picked him up, dropped him, and picked him up again, then he bit me on the finger. I really took a look at him then, and thought 'That's no little garter snake."'

Butts was with a friend who lived nearby and they went to his house, where she put a paper towel on the wound, which was bleeding a bit.

When she removed the paper towel, she saw that the finger was so swollen it was pushing the other fingers out of the way. As her friend continued to assure her it was "probably nothing," she watched her digits swell like a cartoon hand smashed with an anvil.

Her knuckles disappeared and she noticed a certain numbness, and a certain purpleness, and greenness.

"I'm going to the hospital," she told her companion, and out the door she went. Once at Wilkes-Barre General Hospital, she was asked to look at mug shots of different snakes while staffers pumped four IVs of anti-venom into her veins.

"I actually thought it looked more like a rattlesnake, but without a rattle," Butts said, "but the doctors told me that the way my lymph nodes swelled up so quickly, it was probably a copperhead."

That's the doctors at Harrisburg Pinnacle Hospital, where Butts was flown via Lear jet when she didn't respond to treatment quickly.

There, she is being monitored, she is in pain, and her arm is still, well, big. Doctors have told her she will be fine, and should be released tomorrow or Sunday, although it might be some time before she can return to her job at a Kingston Turkey Hill.

"I probably would do it again, but I'd be more careful," Butts said. "I still don't want people whacking snakes with brooms, but I'd try to be more aware of what I was dealing with."

As for the snakes, Butts might best help the next one she encounters by leaving it alone.

"I got a call about this snake at 2 a.m. Thursday," said Wildlife Pest Control license holder Tony Margelewicz, of Nanticoke, "but when I called the number where the snake was supposed to be, a woman told me that the problem had been taken care of, that they had cut the snake's head off with an ice chopper."

Still, it's the thought that counts.
Laflin woman who tried to help Hanover Twp. man move snake ends up bit by a copperhead

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• PA Press: Laflin woman who tried to help Hanover Twp. man move snake ends up bit by a copperhead - W von Papineäu, Tue Aug 19 13:32:39 2003