Take my advice: Watch where you walk, wear those shoes

It’s safe to say that many St. Landry Parish residents call themselves country.
As citizens of a parish where farming is the predominant industry, many people here would be correct in calling themselves rural folk.
My claim to country-ness includes being the daughter, granddaughter and great-granddaughter of farmers. I know how to ride and saddle a horse, build crawfish traps, bog (and un-bog) a four wheeler, hunt, fish and take care of a manner of livestock including chickens, and I was heavily involved in 4-H as a child.
I know how to build fence lines, and I also have my Ph.D….a degree in Post Hold Digging. I own boots ranging from knee to hip to chest wader and know when each pair are needed. I’d rather be outside getting dirty, whether it’s for work or pleasure, than be cooped up in the house or at the mall.
And above all, I tend to walk around barefoot, one of the overall signs that a person is indeed “country.”
But as some things in life tend to do, my country lifestyle almost became the near-death of me.
On a September Saturday night, I decided to use the commercial break during an LSU football game to step outside at my mom’s and check on some solar lights I had just replaced for her on the east side of her home. The sun had just slipped below the treeline at the back of her property, so I grabbed a flashlight even though I could technically still see with the little bit of light still clinging to the horizon.
I slipped on a pair of flip flops, went out the back door and breezed on by the few tools my mother keeps right next to one of the back doors of the house, including two shovels. Again, another sign that a person is country, and these two shovels have been used to kill six snakes in the last six months, one of them a copperhead.
I was about 10 feet from one of the lights I was going to check when I felt something pinch the arch support on my right foot. “Great,” I thought, “Thirty plus years of walking around bare footed in Louisiana, and I get bitten by a crawfish now?”
I kicked my leg out, and the pinch went away. When I looked down, there was no crawfish, but instead, a sizable copperhead snake. I ran (worst idea ever, but hey, it may have been the last time I’d ever get to run), flung open the back door and said “Snake bite. Hospital. Now.” to my mother.
I kept my slightly bloody foot on my dashboard all the way to the Ville Platte hospital, and when we arrived, I ran (again, bad idea) all the way to the ER. At this point in time, it should have crossed my mind that maybe I didn’t have any venom in me because I didn’t feel odd except for a racing heart (all that darn running).
I made it to a room, had my vitals checked, wound cleaned and examined and then began the questions: How long ago were you bitten? Did you see the snake? What kind of snake was it? The doctor took a good, hard look at my foot and said “Well, you don’t have any puncture wounds. It looks like it just scratched you. Otherwise, by now, your foot would be swollen and purple.”
“We’ll wait an hour and see what happens.”
My admitting clerk brought me a glass of water, my nurse turned the game on for me and the wait began. When it became evident that LSU was stomping their opponent, I sat there obsessively comparing the color of the arch supports of my feet and the veins just below the surface. I had two parallel, centimeter long scratch marks and two and three itty bitty pin prick-like marks in my right arch support.
My nurse dropped by to check on me, and he gave me a sufficient summary of the state’s poisonous snake population. The worst one is the coral snake, whose venom is a powerful neurotoxin that paralyzes the breathing muscles. The rest of the population follows the pattern of a copperhead bite -- swollen and purple.
Two hours and one tetanus shot later, and I was discharged with merely a “dry bite” from the snake.
“You are very lucky,” my doctor said.
“You sure are,” said my nurse. “Anti venom is $5,000 a bottle, and you need four to start off the treatment.”
Yikes. That’s like a car. Or a down payment on a tractor. Or a four-wheeler, a horse, a new fence line and a new gun for duck hunting season.
While I’m mostly annoyed, shocked and a bit embarrassed and traumatized about the ordeal, I am at least proud I was able to identify the snake.
Growing up country, my dad taught me which snakes were poisonous, and I’ve killed every one I’ve ever seen in my parents’ yard, save for my buddy who kept me from enjoying the rest of the LSU game on the sofa at the camp, where I was intending to go at halftime.
Even if you’re not country and your children aren’t either, please take time out to teach them about the poisonous snakes in this state. Or bring them to my mom’s, and I’ll teach them because I now plan to use all of my free time killing anything that slithers through my mom’s yard. Bring your gun and your lawn chair and we’ll make a time of it.
The only good snake in my book is a dead snake.