I had the opportunity to educate one my fellow ER physicians
Yah, ER physicians usually don't know much about snake bites. My Nephew was bitten by a pygmy rattlesnake taken to one hospital, then sent to another. In any event, he was in the PICU in Florida Hospital (Orlando) when I went to see him. His mother was quite tired, and asked if I would visit with him while she and her husband went to get something to eat. NotAProblem! Crazy Jazy and I were good friends, and I heard his side of how his younger brother collected the snake. Then a nurse came in, with another nurse she was orienting, followed by a doctor reading some instructions. As he passed by to the other side I read at the top of the paper in bright red letters: May cause allergic reaction! The doctor explained that it was anti-venom, and he was about to inject it into the drip IV. Cool. The nurse measured out the dose and then injected it into the IV. They checked the flow, and all three of them filed out of his room to attend to other matters.
Within a few nanoseconds of them leaving, my nephew started to sneeze. And sneeze. And sneeze. Phlegm was flying everywhere. His pulse raced to over 160, though no alarm went off. Oh my, I was out of my depth and stuck my head out the door and saw the doctor still reading those instructions. He came into the room, and quickly pulled the IV out. Then he grabbed an oxy mask, ripped it open, but it would fit the tube coming out of the wall. He tried another, and another, with no better result. Being a mechanic and having worked in a lab in college, I saw the problem. I grabbed the hose and the mask from him, pulled out the short, hard tube in the hose, slapped the mask tube together and gave it back to the doctor. He told me what to set the 0
2 at (my side of the bed) and he put the canula onto my nephew. About this time, his pulse started to drop, he stopped sneezing, and of course, the head nurse walks in with her orientee. She sees the look on the doctor, sees the elevated pulse, sees the nasal canula, looks at me and orders me out. ??? Before I could protest, the doctor told her that that no, I can stay. We both allow the nurses to do their thing and step out to the hallway.
My sister told me that they had brought the snake with them in the collection jar, so I asked the doc if I could see it. "Funny thing about that..." he started, and then he told me about what happened. The security officer in the ICU decided that he was going to dispatch the snake with his service revolver. After all, he believed in the myth that the snake would strike at the hot bullet, killing itself in the process. Sigh. What he didn't realize was that he was standing in a fire-ant bed. So about the time he had unscrewed the collection jar, the ants started to bite. They use a pheromone to bite in unison, which startled him that he dropped the open container, his service revolver, and jumped away. Apparently, allergic to their bites, he started to go into an anaphylactic shock and was currently being treated in the ER. Wow. The snake escaped. That scenario was not on my bingo card.
Sorry for the length, but it's kind of funny.