As the marketing director for uShaka Marine World, Grant Adams has encountered his fair share of wild and deadly creatures.
But nothing could have prepared him for his encounter with a 1.1m Mozambique spitting cobra that slithered up the drainage system and bit him on the foot while he took a shower at a lodge in Hluhluwe, Zululand, on Saturday.
“It was like a scene from a movie,” Adams said yesterday.
“There you are having a shower and a snake crawls up the drain,” he said.
Adams took his family to visit friends at a lodge in the Hluhluwe game reserve on Saturday.
Later that night, as Zulu dancers entertained the visitors around a fire and African drums thumped, Adams decided to take a shower before starting the braai.
“I got into the shower and suddenly I felt this sharp pain in my ankle.
“I jumped out of the shower and when I turned back to see what it was, it was a spitting cobra standing erect, about a half a metre out of the drain pipe,” he said.
Adams said he ran towards the area where his friends and family were and told them he had been bitten.
“Everything from there worked like clockwork. I think I was lucky, with all the things that took place.
“The trick was to keep calm throughout the whole ordeal,” he said.
As the deadly venom worked its way into Adams’ bloodstream, one of his friends wrapped his leg in bandage from his ankle to his knees to minimise the tissue damage, while another friend went to the shower to kill the snake so that it could be identified.
Adam’s friend called two game rangers who were in the vicinity. They arrived within 10 minutes.
“The rangers immediately recognised that it was a Mozambique spitting cobra. They said I needed to go to hospital quickly,” Adams said.
Adams called his friend, snake specialist Dr Mark Penning, who told him what to expect and what to do.
“He told my wife that I had three hours. Being in Zululand, we were an hour and a half from the nearest hospital in Richards Bay.
“We called the hospital to ask whether they had the antivenom and when they said they did, I got into my friend’s car and he just put his foot down.
“We got to the hospital in 55 minutes,” he said.
At the hospital, Adams was put on painkillers and given the antivenom two and a half hours after he was bitten.
“I was calm throughout the ordeal.
“The only time I was slightly worried was when I first arrived at hospital and I was hot, started vomiting and feeling very sick,” he said.
He was discharged on Monday.
Adams said he was lucky to have survived and is thankful that it was not his seven-year- old daughter or 10-year-old son who had got in the shower first.
“At the moment, I keep playing it back in my mind – how it came up from the pipe in the shower; how the kids or my wife could have been in the shower before me; how it may have come up when we were sleeping, how it is one of the four snakes that are responsible for the most human deaths in South Africa and many other things,” he said.
Being a snake bite survivor, however, does not mean that your friends can’t pick on you, Adams has discovered.
“One of my friends said he is getting rid of all of the Cobra taps in his house in protest,” he laughed.
- Daily News
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