A Connecticut animal lover was snake-smitten but his care for the reptile nearly cost him his life.
Joseph Ricciardella, 45, was bitten by a rattlesnake Sunday night when he tried to bring the critter off the roadway to safety on his way to Torrington.
The dad of one was driving home when he saw a snake in the middle of the road and stopped to help the slithery reptile. But as he placed a spare shirt over the rattlesnake’s head and picked it up, the deadly animal bit his hand, WFSB reported.
He quickly called his former girlfriend who he shares a 4-year-old daughter with, Brittany Hilmeyer, but she thought he was just joking at first — until the venom started to affect his speech.
“He was getting to the point where he really couldn’t talk,” Hilmeyer told the station. “You couldn’t understand him. It was like trying to talk to someone with a mouth full of marbles.”
Ricciardella, who owns a landscaping business, found a way to drive himself to a nearby hospital before he was airlifted to Hartford Hospital where he was administered the needed doses of anti-venom, Hilmeyer said.
Before that, his respiratory system began to fail and he went into cardiac arrest, WFSB reported.
The dad has been making slow progress since the terrifying ordeal but remains in the hospital.
“The doctor said he looks a little less swollen today,” Hilmeyer told CT Insider on Tuesday.
“He woke up this morning because they lowered the sedatives, he was able to nod his head and he squeezed the doctor’s hand when he was talking to him,” she added.
“They put him back under, but they also said intubation tubes may come out soon and they just have to wait for the anesthesia department to look at the swelling in his throat.”
Ricciardella has always had an outgrown love of animals, according to his loved ones.
Growing up in Waterbury and upstate New York, he and his brother Robert used to capture snakes as boys, the sibling told the newspaper.
He also let an injured bat that he found in his home stay there until it fully recovered.
Connecticut has two venomous snakes in the state: the timber rattlesnake and the copperhead, but they will only bite if they feel threatened or are handled, according to the state’s Department of Environmental Protection.