PAHRUMP VALLEY TIMES (Pahrump, Nevada) 06 October 04 Snakebite survivor recalls night encounter (Phillip Gomez)
While residents in Nye County's small desert communities wait with baited breath for a regional hospital to be built in Pahrump, an Amargosa Valley woman recently experienced a not-so-freakish medical emergency from which she is still recovering - physically as well as financially.
The experience points at the dangers of living in a remote area without benefit of an urban hospital within easy reach and the crucial necessity of taking precautions in the outdoors at a time when emergency medical help can still be hours away.
On the night of Aug. 4, Karen Gilligan, 50, was bitten by a rattlesnake while taking her dog for a walk around her house on 10 acres in Amargosa Valley. It was the beginning of a four-day ordeal that she said has been the most memorable of her life.
It had been a typical day for Gilligan, who works as a cook at Sheri's Ranch brothel in southern Pahrump. She had returned home after work at 6 p.m., spent time with her dog, Holly, and worked at her computer. Around 8:20 p.m. she took Holly out for a walk. It would be the last walk of the evening for the dog and was just around her property, so Gilligan didn't think to change from her house flip-flops into hiking boots or anything sturdier.
"That was a big mistake," she said looking back on the incident. She also failed to carry a flashlight. Another mistake, for it was past dark.
"I didn't even see it," she said. "I have a feeling I might have stepped on it. It stuck to my foot. It got me in the left heel."
Later at the hospital, nurses measured the fang marks on her heel. They were four to five inches long, Gilligan said.
"It was a pretty heavy snake," she said.
"I never saw or heard this snake until it was too late," Gilligan says on her Internet web site, where she described the experience to serve as a warning to others. "It bit me, a very sharp pain. I looked down to see what had gotten me, only to see this snake stuck on me, rattles shaking fiercely. I had to shake my foot to get it off me. It was thrown loose and crawled away.
"It was pissed off," she says. By the glimmer of house lights she could tell it was a big snake.
Gilligan walked over to her twin sister's house next door, announcing, "I've just been bitten by a snake!" Still not thinking it was anything too serious, she happened to catch her sister visiting with her best friend, which would prove the silver lining of her misfortune.
Gilligan thought she would just soak the wounded foot in warm water and Epsom salt. But her sister's friend, Essie Gills, a couple of nights earlier had caught a TV show called "Venom ER," a new series on the Animal Planet channel. Gills urged Gilligan to call 911 immediately, then went ahead and punched the numbers for her.
Within 15 minutes an ambulance arrived in front of the house with three paramedics. They looked at Gilligan's foot, which by now had started to hurt.
"It didn't take long to kick right in," she remembers. "It was burning really bad." She also remembers someone telling her it was a diamondback that had bitten her. Sidewinders are more common in the area, but this rattler was bigger than the other specie.
She was told to stay calm. The EMTs took her blood pressure and other vital signs. After conferring, they decided their patient needed helicopter evacuation by Mercy Air to Las Vegas.
The EMTs helped her walk down the porch steps, laid her in the gurney and put her into the ambulance.
They drove down Farm Road to the Amargosa clinic to await the arrival of the helicopter. Within five minutes they could hear the chopper coming.
The EMTs took her from the ambulance to the chopper, where she was hoisted into the bay. The wind created by the prop blades and the machine's engine lingers in her memory of the night.
She was alone in the dark with the two pilots as the bay doors closed. The engine revved up and she could feel it lifting off of the ground. Hooked up to oxygen, her blood pressure was again taken. The 79-mile flight to Sunrise Hospital in Las Vegas lasted only about half an hour, she said.
That helicopter ride would cost Gilligan $11,000; she had no health insurance. "The whole episode broke me, and that was just the beginning," she said.
"In the meantime," she writes, "the venom has progressed up into my thigh. I cold feel the burning, I could see the redness, swelling, muscle twitching and the pain ... this was just the beginning of a night of sheer pain."
There was talk of transporting her to Loma Linda Hospital in California, where the facility is well stocked with anti-venom for snakebite victims.
"Had I been flown there I probably would have been on Animal Planet's 'Venom ER,'" she said, which is where the show is filmed.
As it was, Gilligan had enough drama going on. Put through the customary admittance procedures, she finally was whisked into the Emergency Room. More blood was drawn. She was hooked up to oxygen as a precaution against a bodily reaction to the small dosage of anti-venom given to her.
The dosage was increased when no reaction took place. But Gilligan overheard one doctor say they only had six units of anti-venom on hand and that more would be needed.
Gilligan chronicled the rest of her stay in the ER, from the night of her arrival until a day and a half after getting there:
"My memories of that event are unforgettable. There is only one word for all this and it is PAIN. Not from the anti-venom per se; the pain was caused from the venom that by now had spread up into my midsection. Yes, I could see the venom traveling upwards, crawling under my skin, finding weak spots in my tissue. It was digesting me."
No pain medicine was given to Gilligan because it might have adversely affected the action of the anti-venom. As she lay there, Gilligan said her muscles ached and twitched, feeling "like twisting knots inside me, especially in my midsection. It felt like cramps, like everything was going to explode."
Gilligan was hooked up to antibiotics given intravenously, her vital signs monitored by machines. Two nurses watched over her. Finally she was able to get relief from her pain with morphine injections. She rested for the first time.
One of the nurses told her then how dangerously close she had come to death the nights before.
Gilligan said she was told the number of platelets in her bloodstream assisting in blood clotting had been down to nine when she was brought into the ER; the normal level is between 170 and 200. Had her count dropped any further she would have internally bled to death.
"That damned snake!" she said. "That venom really moves fast. It screws up the whole blood system. I almost died that night, and the pain! The pain is just phenomenal."
Gilligan continued to suffer, and new reactions affected her body. An outbreak of hives and a rash infected her, either as an after-effect of the venom or a side effect of the anti-venom. She had consumed 64 units of anti-venom, the most expensive line item of her hospital bill: $42,000. But, it saved her life.
Since her encounter with wildlife, Gilligan has been recovering at home. Walking on her foot has been difficult. She's getting better, but has suffered some bone disintegration in her foot. At first confined to a walker for three weeks, Gilligan now uses a cane to get around.
Her doctor wants her to take another month off of work to heal, but she wants to cut that time in half, saying she needs to get back in order to pay her bills.
Having worked at Sheri's for only five weeks prior to the accident, Gilligan wasn't yet eligible for group health insurance coverage.
"The medical bills are coming in now and they are quite high," she said. Total medical costs amount to $65,000, she said.
Gilligan wants others to take her own experience into account as a warning to take care of where they walk and how. If bitten by a snake, call 911 immediately she said. "Get help as soon as possible. Don't take it lightly as I did."
Snakebite survivor recalls night encounter