Chris Howarth, from Idaho, was checking a water line in his parents’ yard in Oroville, California, when a western rattlesnake bit him not once, but twice. One of the bites hit a vein, and the venom traveled directly into his bloodstream.
At Oroville Hospital, they began treating him, but the symptoms kept returning again and again: a numb tongue, swollen lymph nodes, and increasingly difficult breathing. On the third day, his blood stopped clotting properly. By the sixth, the hospital had already given him 36 vials of antivenom and had none left.
They put him on a helicopter bound for Stanford Hospital in Palo Alto, where they tried another type of antivenom. In total, his body received 54 doses, and he spent between 11 and 12 days hospitalized, most of them in intensive care. His wife Jenny never left his side. Today, Chris is alive, amid a year with an alarming increase in rattlesnake bites in California.