TAMPA – An 8-year-old boy was kept under observation for 10 hours at University Community Hospital after he was bitten on the finger by a pygmy rattlesnake Friday afternoon in New Tampa.
“It was a little scary going to the hospital,” the boy, Jacob Hyatt, said today in an interview at his family’s home. “I thought it was a rattlesnake that bit me and I thought the venom … spreading [was] killing me.”
The third-grader said he was outside his home, playing with his brother’s bungee cord, when it got stuck in a tree on a stretch of grass between the street and a sidewalk. He decided to use a rock at the base of the tree as a makeshift stool so he could reach the cord, but when he put his hands under the rock, the snake bit him.
“It snapped at my finger,” Hyatt said. “After it snapped at me, I could see it trying to go back in [to its place under the rock].” It felt like a bee sting, he said.
Hyatt ran home, trying to push the blood out of his finger to make the bleeding stop, he said. It was a good thing he did, his mother, Teresa, later said, because he might have pushed much of the venom out when he did so.
Teresa Hyatt said firefighters found the pygmy rattlesnake and killed it.
“I was freaking out because first thing, I thought, is the venom and if it traveled it could kill him,” she said. “You just don’t know.”
She said there are many pygmy rattlesnakes in New Tampa – on the sidewalks, on the street. One woman found one in her garage, she said.
“The kids need to be aware that if you see something in the bush, you kick it with your tennis shoe,” she said. “You don’t put your hands under anything you can’t see where your hands are going.”
Jacob has learned that lesson the hard way.
“Don’t stick your hands under anywhere you can’t see it … what’s under it,” he said.