Johannes Ferreira recovers at Pietermaritzburgs Edendale Hospital after being bitten on the hand by a puff adder yesterday. Picture: Shan Pillay
Sharika Regchand
ONCE bitten, twice shy. So goes the adage.
But a Howick West man found himself recovering in hospital from a snake bite for the second time in five years after being bitten yesterday.
Johannes Ferreira, 38, was visiting friends at a smallholding in Thornville, outside Pietermaritzburg, and helping them clean the yard when he was bitten by a puff adder.
The nature lover, who says he reads enough about snakes to be able to identify them, said they were cutting the grass and had moved a piece of asbestos to place it against a wall when the snake bit him on the ring finger of his right hand.
“I knew immediately that it was a puff adder,” he said from his bed at Pietermaritzburg’s Edendale Hospital yesterday.
He rushed to a tap and placed his hand under running water, hoping to flush out the poison.
“I don’t know what it is with me and snakes,” he said, recalling his previous misadventure, when he was bitten on the same hand but on a different finger, also while visiting friends.
In that incident, Ferreira, a welder, had heard his friends’ dog barking. On investigating, he saw the dog confronting a snake he said was a burrowing adder.
Believing that it was about to strike the dog, Ferreira had intervened and shoved the snake away, but was bitten for his trouble.
Ferreira spent 15 days in hospital recovering from that bite.
In pain after yesterday’s incident, he was confident that he would recover soon.
Both Netcare911 and ER24 paramedics had responded to his friend’s call for assistance yesterday. Ferreira’s hand was swollen when medics arrived and he was treated at the scene before being admitted to hospital.
A doctor, who would not be named for professional reasons, said a puff adder bite could be fatal if proper treatment was not received timeously.
However, with proper treatment, victims could recover fully.
