Once bitten, but not shy, boy back at school after snake encounter

Sabrina Mize was watching her 8-year-old son Dylan jumping on a trampoline in a friend’s backyard in Quail Hollow before he jumped off to chase a ball barefoot through the grass.

A few seconds later, he was running towards her.

“Mom, I got bit by a snake,’’ he told her.

Sabrina didn’t believe it at first.

“Did he just say what I thought he said?,’’ she thought.

Sure enough, upon further inspection, Dylan’s left ankle had two small, but very defined, puncture marks.

While Dylan had snake venom in his veins, Sabrina must have had ice water running through hers.

After getting some ice for his foot, she went hunting for the snake, hoping to identify it and praying it wasn’t poisonous. About a foot-and-a-half long, she found it where her son had likely stepped on it, prompting the bite. She inched closer, within ten feet or so, and snapped a quick picture of the red-and-orange-colored snake on her cell phone before returning to her son.

All the while, she stayed calm, cool and collected.

“Because my son was calm, I was calm,’’ Sabrina says. “He was upset when I went to go find the snake, but that was really it.”

Sabrina sent the picture to a friend, asking if she knew what kind of a snake it was. That’s when Facebook sprung into action.

Shortly after her friend took the photo and posted it on the more-than- 8,000-member-strong Wesley Chapel Community Facebook page, local animal specialist Chris Wirt (we featured him in our issue dated October 24, 2015) received a message on his cellphone. He had been tagged in the Facebook post.

There is a friendly, running joke on the Facebook page about snakes and Wirt, the former Wesley Chapel resident who owns A All Animal Control of Tampa Bay. It seems like at least once a week, someone in the Wesley Chapel Community is tagging him and hoping he can identity some creature that has camped out on someone’s porch or driveway to help determine the level of danger to the home’s inhabitants and pets.

And, it doesn’t just happen on the Wesley Chapel Community page. Wirt estimates that he receives five requests a day calling on his expertise with all kinds of critters from across the Bay area.

In this case, Wirt knew the snakebite was nothing to trifle with — he replied that Dylan had been bitten by a cottonmouth, a highly venomous type of water moccasin.

Sabrina already was at Florida Hospital Wesley Chapel (FHWC) when she received the news, about an hour after Dylan had been bit. Dylan was then transported to Florida Hospital Tampa because it has inpatient pediatric beds (FHWC does not). There, he was treated with anti-venin to combat the dangerous bite.

Sometimes, anti-venin isn’t necessary, even when the victim is bitten by a venomous snake. According to the Tampa Poison Center website, 25 percent of snakebites are “dry bites,” where no venom is introduced to the body.

In Dylan’s case, the swelling had worsened, and had moved up his leg and was now creeping up the back of his calf. Sabrina said the bottom half of his leg “blew up so much you couldn’t touch the skin; it was so tight and so hard.”

Dylan received a treatment of antivenin at 8 p.m. His body reacted well to it, so he received two more treatments over the next twelve hours.

Sometimes, like in the case of Hope Allen, the Greater Wesley Chapel Chamber of Commerce president, more drastic measures are required. In 2014, Allen was bitten by a pygmy rattlesnake — which Wirt says is the most common snake he comes across in Wesley Chapel — and required 18 vials of anti-venin and a five-day stay at FHWC, including two in the Intensive Care Unit.

“(Dylan) might have only gotten a little tiny bite of the venom,’’ Wirt said. “But if you don’t pay attention to what’s going on and keep running around or whatever, it could start eating away at the muscle or nerve…and it could absolutely be fatal. The 5-to-6 deaths we see every year, though, are usually because the people bit are someplace where they can’t get medical care.”

After two days in the hospital, Tampa Poison Control cleared the Veterans Elementary second-grader for a Wednesday release. The hospital kept him an additional night, just to be safe.

Sabrina said Dylan, who returned to school last week and is now off crutches, was probably more upset about the extra night in the hospital than he was about getting bitten by the cottonmouth.

On Thursday, Dylan was cleared by his doctors and left the hospital in a wheelchair.

The next day, he was back at the same friend’s house, whose yard had been cleared and treated for free by Wirt. Dylan spent most of New Year’s Eve sitting in a chair with his leg elevated, holding a stick wrapped in the skin of the snake that bit him, compliments of a neighbor who had killed it.

Wirt is currently offering his snake service for $175 (it normally costs $250), which includes clearing the yard of any snake dens or nests and treating the perimeter of the yard and the house. He can be reached at tampa@aallanimalcontrol, or visit AAllAnimalControl.com/tampa.