A Washington state man got an unpleasant surprise
while shopping at Walmart when what he thought was a stick turned out to
be a rattlesnake — and bit him.
Mica Craig, a
47-year-old married father of two, was shopping for mulch in the
Clarkston, Wash., store's outdoor garden area for the medical marijuana
he is licensed to grow.
"I reached
down to grab the stick to move it out of the way, and the snake
stretched out, turned around and got its fangs in my right hand," he
said.
"When I shook
it and heard the rattles, I knew it was a rattlesnake and then I
freaked. I was screaming bloody murder through the parking lot," he told local radio station KIRO.
"I slung it off and I did a tap dance on it until it was dead," he added.
Another
shopper, Maria Geffre, saw Craig fall to the ground afterward, yelling
that he had been bitten by a snake, and rushed to his aid.
"He had punctures on his hand and there was the dead rattler he'd stomped on," she said, adding that the snake had four rattles.
She left her
husband waiting in their pick-up truck, jumped in Craig's car and drove
him to the hospital in the next town over, just across the Snake River
in Idaho, the Lewiston Tribune reported.
Craig said
emergency room doctors sent him home at first because he had little
swelling and the bite appeared not to have any venom.
But he said
his hand swelled up to the size of a grapefruit afterward, and he went
back to the hospital, where he said he was treated with six bags of
anti-venom.
"As of right
now, my little finger doesn't move at all and my ring finger barely
moves. I'm hoping it's just swelling," he told KIRO.
"I don’t know if I’ll ever go back to Walmart," he added.
Walmart
apologized for the incident and said it would look into the matter.
Craig said Walmart had told him a pest control company was clearing the
area and had found other snakes, according to the Tribune.
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