With his phone ringing hot with an unusually high number of tiger snake sightings, snake catcher Glen Peacock has been keeping the world's fourth-most venomous slitherer front of mind this summer.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
or signup to continue reading
But it turns out he should have been more worried about the more common, but also venomous, red-bellied black snake.
Mr Peacock, a professional snake catcher in the NSW Illawarra for the past seven years, is back to work after surviving a white-knuckle drive home with red-belly venom coursing through his system last month.
Despite long-time knowledge of how to manage a snake bite, he says he "did all the wrong things" in his darkest hour, initially dismissing the bite as a likely "dry bite" - without venom - and driving himself home from Wongawilli, a move at odds with medical advice to stay still, and one that cost him a crucial 15 minutes.
"It was a fairly small snake - I'd say 60cm - but it was in a garden bed where it was heavily overgrown. I spent ages looking for it and only saw a tiny section of its tail. I underestimated how big it was and it was able to curl around the other side of the bush and grab my left pinkie," Mr Peacock said.
"At the beginning it didn't hurt. I bandaged my arm on site just to take precautions. It was after a while that the hand swelled up."
Mr Peacock was sweating and vomiting profusely by the time he arrived home to his wife Pam Peacock and "nearly fell out of the car". With a severe headache and his bitten finger turning black, he was rushed to hospital, where he developed a heart murmur and doctors were concerned he would go into renal failure. By then the pain in his hand was "agonising".
Later, he also had to endure "a stern talking-to" from Pam.
"As the ambos were there treating him I was thinking, 'I'm going to kill him'," Pam told ACM.
IN OTHER NEWS:
Mr Peacock has some ongoing numbness in his fingers. While he was hospitalised Pam, who once had a crippling fear of snakes, took over his snake-catching work.
"Until I met Glen, I would faint when I saw them," she said.
"I still have a fear of them, but it's not a crippling fear. It's more of a respect."
Mr Peacock concedes he was "a little bit lackadaisical" about the red-belly, and said he would have called paramedics immediately, had the snake been a Tiger.
