Snake bite victim is twice as shy now

Craig Warhurst

“I'M still crooked they wouldn't let me use the siren,” amateur ambulance driver Reg Lawler said at Dagun yesterday.

Reg is the first to admit that when his next door neighbour Elaine Bradley went to hospital with snake bite on Wednesday, she had the best of paramedical care but only an enthusiastic amateur behind the wheel.

“The ambulance officer wanted to keep an eye on Elaine and it was a single-officer callout, so I drove,” Reg said yesterday.

Elaine, an enthusiastic nature lover with a large Nature Refuge area on her property, is no stranger to snakes and the need to keep a watch out for them.

“We've lost animals to snake bite and it's not the first time I've been bitten,” she said.

But Elaine wasn't out in the wild tramping through the kind of thick undergrowth that makes us all snake-aware.

The Doyle Road resident was bringing in the washing when a reptile she believes to be a small but still potentially lethal brown snake bit her on the foot. The incident happened just near her laundry.

“I wasn't taking my usual care because I was somewhere where I didn't think I needed to,” she said.

“I felt awful initially but I could have just been woozy from the adrenalin, because you know how panic sets in sometimes.

“It was only a small snake and I don't seem to have suffered any ill effects.”

She rang Reg and Jude Lawler for help.

“I was up the paddock and when I came down Jude was on the phone to Elaine. By the time I got there, Elaine had the pressure bandage on already.”

Yesterday, Elaine presented Reg with a token of her gratitude for his efforts in driving her to rendezvous with the ambulance at Long Flat - a bottle of five-year old South Australian Craneford shiraz.