An animal-loving father nearly died when he tried to rescue what turned out to be a very dangerous animal in the middle of a busy road.
Joey Ricciardella of Connecticut was returning home to Torrington after dropping his four-year-old daughter off with his mother in New York on Sunday when he came across a snake lying in the middle of the road.
Ricciardella, who has a soft spot for animals, stopped his vehicle and grabbed a shirt from the back seat, placed it over the snake’s head and lifted it to move it. WFSB reports.
But the animal in danger was a poisonous rattlesnake and when Ricciardella went to grab it, the lethal reptile bit his hand.
Joey Ricciardella of Torrington was heading home after dropping his four-year-old daughter off with her mother in New York on Sunday when he came across a timber rattlesnake lying in the middle of the road.
“It sounded like he was trying to put on a funny voice, like I thought he was joking with me at first,” Brittany Hilmeyer, the mother of his 4-year-old son, said of her subsequent conversation with him.
She explained that she was used to Ricciardella being a joker, but she soon realized something was very wrong.
“It was getting to the point where he couldn’t really speak. He couldn’t be understood,” she said.
“It was like trying to talk to someone whose mouth was full of marbles.”
Hilmeyer didn’t know it at the time, but the venom from the snakebite was affecting his ability to breathe.
He added that he was not surprised when he later discovered that Ricciardella did everything he could to help the snake.
“At one point he had a bat in his house with a broken wing and he was trying to fix it,” she said.
“Last week I was a bunny.”
The poisonous snake bit his hand, causing him to have trouble breathing.
Ricciardella attempted to wrap the snake’s head in a shirt from his car and tried to move it out of the way of the busy street.
Somehow, Ricciardella managed to get back into his car and drove to the nearest hospital, where doctors determined that his respiratory system was failing and he suffered cardiac arrest.
But because of a shortage of antivenom at Charlotte Hungerford Hospital in Torrington, he had to be transferred to Hartford Hospital in the state capital.
“I guess it’s not common in many hospitals to carry large amounts of antivenom,” Hilmeyer said.
“That was part of the problem when he went to the first hospital. At the second hospital, more patients arrived by plane.”
Ricciardella is an animal lover who once tried to help a bat with a broken wing.
There are only two venomous snakes living in Connecticut: the northern copperhead and the timber rattlesnake, both of whose bites can be fatal.
The Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection recommends that anyone who encounters either species observe it from a distance and move away slowly.
But Ricciardella was lucky and is said to be doing well in hospital after suffering not only the poison but also a life-threatening allergic reaction that resulted in him being put into a medically induced coma, according to an online fundraiser created to pay his medical bills.
“There have been improvements, but the medical bills are piling up and he has no insurance because he is self-employed as a landscaper,” the fundraiser says, noting that he has four children, three of whom are under the age of 16.
Ricciardella is now expected to recover in the Intensive Care Unit for at least another week.
“They’re waiting for the swelling to go down,” Hilmeyer said. “Then they won’t sedate him as heavily.”
“That’s when he’ll be able to talk.”