A NorCal hospital completely ran out of anti-venom in a desperate attempt to save the life of a father of three bitten twice by a deadly rattlesnake.
Christopher Howarth was visiting his parents’ home in Lake Oroville from Idaho back in May when he ventured into their backyard to check a leaking pipeline.
Moving through the shadows, he stepped on what he thought was a plant — but it was a rattlesnake.
“I got bit twice, and one of the bites, where it was, was kind of shallow, but the other one got my vein,” Chris Howarth told SFGate.
By the time his wife, Jenny, raced him to Oroville Hospital, Howarth was already spiraling: his tongue went numb, his lymph nodes ballooned, and his lungs began to fail.
Docs pumped him with antidote, but by day three, the horror deepened.
A rare blood-clotting condition took hold, and Howarth’s thigh swelled as the hospital threw everything they had at him—including 54 vials of anti-venom.
The hospital ran out of anti-venom on the fifth day. “I wasn’t sure if I was going to pull through. At one point, I wrote some letters to my kids to make sure they had one last letter from Dad,” he told the news outlet.
The NorCal hospital immediately transferred him to the Stanford Hospital where he received a different anti-venom that helped alleviate his symptoms.
Howarth is now back in Idaho with his family after 12 grueling days in the hospital.
“Chris has been unable to work during this time and for an unknown amount of time in the future as he is home and still healing,” the family said in a fundraising plea, hoping to cover the expenses.
