A Flaxton mum, who is probably the Sunshine Coast’s first snake bite victim of the season, has issued a warning to families everywhere to declutter their yards to avoid giving snakes somewhere to lurk.
Thankfully, mum-of-five Sharn Smith suffered only a dry bite and she was released safely from Nambour Hospital after an anxious 12 hours of observation.
It was just after 10pm last Tuesday, when Sharn and her partner Raymond Barwick went outside at their home on Flaxton Mill Road to relax on their garden chairs, as they had done countless times before, when she felt a sting on her ankle.
“It felt kind of like a mozzie bite or a bee sting. I went to swat it away with my hand – I said, ‘Ouch,’ and my partner said, ‘Move, quick,’ and I was like, ‘What the hell?’,” Sharn explained.
“I quickly moved and he saw what was a snake, with a long brownish tail, slithering into a bunch of bushes right where I had been sitting.
“I kind of brushed it off in a sense and my partner was the one that said, ‘You need to go to hospital’. He said, ‘If you don’t call an ambulance, I will’.
“I was more bucking against his wishes, saying, ‘No, no, no, I’m fine,’ but my partner grew up in country New South Wales so he’s very familiar with snakes and he, quite frankly, excuse the language, said, ‘I don’t f*** with snake, so you’re going to the hospital’.
“I didn’t really panic. I started to worry when I got in the ambulance and they started wrapping my leg, they wrapped it all the way up to my thigh, and when I got to the hospital they re-wrapped it again, and that’s when I thought, ‘Okay, this is kind of serious.”
Sharn spent an anxious night in hospital under observation, but thankfully all the tests came back clear.
“It was really dark, none of the tests at the hospital were able to identify it; all it came back with was that it was a dry bite, so no venom was detected at all,” she explained.
The ordeal has spurred the mum to give some helpful advice to others, now that snake season has arrived.
“We have five children, our front yard where we are, we have lots of toys, and the sand pit – all of that sort of stuff – just make sure everything is decluttered, going in to snake season, so there’s nowhere for them to hide and just being really aware. Night or day, it doesn’t hurt to give it a good check,” she said.
“Definitely, if you are going outside at night, use a torch, checking the area, making sure everything is not cluttered.”
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Stu Mackenzie, of Sunshine Coast Snake Catchers 24/7, said snake activity had definitely increased with the warmer weather, but they don’t attack unless they feel threatened.
“I think that’s simply one of those complete accidents,” he said of Sharn’s attack.
“The snake would have probably just been curled up asleep and then noticed two big feet coming down near it and would have freaked out, so that would have been simply a defensive measure.
“It wouldn’t have been a case where the snake’s approached a human to try to bite it, just a complete accident.
“As soon as the weather got over the 23 degree mark, every day since then it has been quite busy, including when it was raining the other day, so I guess the switch has been flicked and the males are fighting each other and looking for a female to mate with and it’s all happening.”
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