A Connecticut man who fell into a coma after being bitten by a rattlesnake he was trying to get off the road is now awake and recounting what he called a hellish, hallucinatory experience.
“I recommend no one approach these snakes,” 45-year-old Joseph Ricciardella advised Connecticut Insider once he could talk.
The father of four had tried to help what looked like a stranded timber rattlesnake off the road, fearing it would get run over, and was bitten instead. The venom sparked an intense allergic reaction that nearly killed him.
Ricciardella was somewhere near the state border after dropping his 4-year-old daughter off at her mother’s house in upstate New York. En route home to Torrington, Conn., he saw the snake, got out of the car to try to shoo it off the road, and then got bitten as he turned away.
He called his daughter’s mother, ex-girlfriend Brittany Hilmeyer, and then sped to a Torrington hospital in “panic mode” as his throat closed and tears streamed from his eyes. His car was found with the engine running and the windshield wipers on, hospital personnel later told him, adding that he almost didn’t make it.
“They told me if it was one minute later, I would not have survived it,” Ricciardella told Connecticut Insider. “It was that serious. My throat shut down.”
After going into cardiac arrest and being resuscitated, he was flown to a Hartford hospital and put into a medically induced coma. He remained intubated and sedated even after doctors woke him.
As of Wednesday, a GoFundMe set up to help the uninsured, self-employed landscaper had brought in more than $26,000 of its $100,000 goal.
With News Wire Services
