GREETINGS...
This is a warning to all who take their ball pythons to a vet in a vehicle, which means just about all of us!
I took my five-year-old male ball python, Kaa, to the vet to have a speculum removed on Friday, 9/17/04. He always travels on my lap, curled up inside of a towel inside of a set of pop trays, one over the other, with air holes cut and punched in them. It's not a secure box - the side holes are large. But - he was always good and slept while I drove.
Yesterday, we were more than halfway there, when I felt something against my leg. I looked, and it was his tail! I grabbed it, but he whipped it up, into where the rest of his body was - he'd disappeared into the crevices underneath the dashboard of my 1992 Aerostar minivan!
In horror, not knowing at the time that vehicles are built with firewalls, I thought that he'd gone into the engine, and that it was mangling him. I managed to pull into the first industrial/construction driveway (we'd just gotten off of the highway), parked and locked, and went running into the McDonalds about five-hundred feet away. I opened the door and screamed for them to call 911, as my animal was caught in my engine!
I ran back to him... To shorten this tale, I had the Avon Police, the North Ridgeville Police, the North Ridgeville Fire Department, and the North Ridgeville Animal Warden show up. There were police cars, a fire truck, and the dog warden's truck, all blocking part of the street, and completly obstructing the construction driveway into which I'd pulled. I had them call my vet and my husband. My husband also called the vet, then drove out with his tool boxes.
It took about three hours to get Kaa out. First we couldn't find him at all. I was still worried about the engine, with its oil, antifreeze, burning hot temperatures, and spinning parts. It was explained to me that he couldn't get from the dashboard to the engine because of the firewall, which keeps the fire out, in case the engines catchs fire. They kept asking me - was I sure that I had a snake in there? They checked the back of the van, but, I told them that he was in the dashboard.
Then, one of the cops spotted him. They kept removing parts, but, none of them was large enough to get a clear shot at him.
I explained to them that you can't PULL a snake, as you'll hurt him, you'll break him in two, you'll damage his digestive organs.
One of the cops also warned the other not to pull him backwards, as he'd rip up his scales.
All of this went on for hours. We had all of these labor forces people milling around, plus my husband and I, the McDonald's guy, and the occassional driver who wanted to know what was going on.
And the truck driver with loads of dirt to be delivered to the construction site, who was pretty upset that he couldn't get in to do his job.
At one point, I put my open hand near Kaa's head (his body was all wrapped around different pieces/parts of the interior of the dashboard), and he rested his little head on my palm. I begged him to come out to me, to get on my hand, but, he moved his head back in, and was gone. I was beside myself, not knowing if this was how it would all end, if I'd ever see him alive again.
In the meantime, there was howling gusts of wind, and it was extremely cold, remnants of the hurricanes, come our way. I gave my husband my parka from the back of the van, but refused to wear the other coat myself. As long as Kaa was cold, I'd be cold. And he was starting to get lethargic. At one point, I had both of my hands on him, but, he was rigid, and tightly squeezed around and against various parts of the contraption. There was no way that I could get him out in one piece!
The entire dash had to be removed, the battery disconnected, the steering wheel disengaged, the lights pulled apart... There was screws and plastic panels everywhere. Because the windshield was still on, and nobody had a short enough screwdriver, it was almost impossible to get at the screws in the fron of the top of the dashboard.
Finally, the animal control guy got him through a crevice, putting both hands on the front of Kaa's body. A cop got him from the back, putting both hands around him, and feeding him towards the cop. Somehow, they inched him out. They triumphanted handed him to me, but not before they snapped a shot of the animal warden holding him up in the air.
The end of the story is that I clasped him to my chest, put on my coat, and wrapped a knit blanket around us. The van had to be towed, as it was torn up and completely undrivable. It took our local Ford dealership four hours to put it back together. We have Super AAA, so the tow was free, but Ford charged $277.55 for the repair!)
While my husband was dealing with the towtruck driver, I sat in his car with Kaa. To my horror, he went through one of the large holes in the blanket, then another, and another. Now he was completely tangled in the blanket. As his body is several inches around at the girth (perhaps three? I'll measure him soon.), the material was constricting him badly. I jumped out of the car, snake and blanket in hand, yelling for my husband that I needed the scissors out of the van before it was towed away. He gave me the scissors, and I freed his head and neck from one of the holes, but the one around his middle was way too tight and close to his skin to risk cutting.
My husband raced us to the vet's office. We were three hours late from our original appointment, and they told us to have a seat. I told them that Kaa was strangulating himself, and they rushed us into a room. The vet came in and somehow eased him forward through the blanket and into freedom.
She said that she should've told me that most of her snake patients arrive in tied off pillowcases, and proceeded to show me with the pillowcase that I had with me - I was using it as a purse. I should've had my money and documents in the box and the snake in the pillowcase!
So, in spite of the trauma and drama, Kaa survived it all without any harm. I put him in his warm aquarium, went to bed in exhaustion, and proceeded to have two nightmares about the incident. (While the incident was all unfolding, I kept hoping that this was just a nightmare, that I'd wake up from it, and that this was not really happening...)
I know that I recovered from it, more or less, when, in the wee hours of this morning, I finally took out the notes that the vet wrote in Kaa's chart: "Kaa got caught up in the van's dashboard; arrived caught up in a yarn blanket." I read it thirty times, and each time, I got caught up in hysterical laughter, to the point of tears. I lost my mind, but got my snake back!
Happy ending to terrifying story!!!
BLESSED BE.
WOLFIN )O(
