I guess this could have gone in the News and Debate forum but I thought it was funny enough to be here and more people would see it here. I live in this area and there are a lot of old lady's and men around here just like this woman.


http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?news ... 8544&rfi=6



POUND Virginia - Gladys Shortt reached beneath her sink last month expecting to find a trash bag and garbage ties, but instead took the first of six bites from a 20-inch copperhead snake that was beating the heat in the cool, dark cabinet. After the first bite, Shortt, who is 95, legally blind and walks with the aid of a walker, reached out again to see if she could feel the culprit, thinking a mouse or other small vermin may be to blame. She felt a second strike hit her right hand.


Determined now to find the source of her bites, Shortt covered her hand in a dish towel, reached in to the cabinet, and came back with "a fistful of snake."



Shortt says she has never been afraid of snakes, and she still isn't, despite her ordeal.

"They're just as afraid of you as you are of them," Shortt said. "If you see one outside, you can just stomp your feet and it'll run away," she added. "He just bit me because he was cornered."

However, Shortt thought it would be necessary to kill the snake, which was as big around as her thumb, so medical personnel could administer proper treatment for her bites. She tried to drown the snake into some hot water standing in her sink, but it slipped loose and bit her again - this time on her left hand.

The snake coiled around Shortt's hands and bit her repeatedly as she tried to subdue it by striking it with the handle of a butter knife, a sharper serrated knife, and finally, a broom stick.

"I was just thumping the tar out of it," Gladys recalled. "The handle of that knife is heavy, so I could really wham it good."

During the fray, Shortt's daughter-in-law, Linda Shortt, came to check on her. Linda, a registered nurse, serves as her home health nurse and stops by every day to check up on her.

Walking across the small bridge that leads to Shortt's house, Linda could hear sounds of a struggle inside. As she approached the door, Linda asked her mother-in-law what was going on.

"I said 'What on earth are you beating on this morning?'" Linda recalled. Gladys's response came just as Linda saw what was going on.

"She said 'This darn snake has bit me three times, and I'm going to kill it," Linda said. As the two struggled, she tried to get to the button on her mother-in-law's medical alert bracelet, but says she couldn't reach. And the snake's head kept popping up, striking Gladys.

"A snake is slippery," Shortt said with a chuckle. "I kept getting ahold of the tail and pulling it down," she said, but the snake kept slithering out of her grip, its head getting nearer to her face in the struggle.

"It was like I was standing outside of a nightmare, watching both of us," Linda said with a shudder.

Meanwhile, Gladys kept trying to subdue or kill the snake, with a new goal: to keep her daughter-in-law from being bitten, too.

"I was afraid she was going to conk out on me," Gladys said. Medical personnel think Shortt's concern for Linda may have helped her through the ordeal.

"She never got excited. She was more scared for me - I was screaming every breath," Linda said.

Finally, Gladys was able to break the snake's neck. Exhausted by the struggle, which the women estimate took about 15-30 minutes, she sat down in a chair as Linda called an ambulance. The two had a while to wait, as Gladys lives in a remote area of Pound only accessible by a long, steep, gravel road.

Linda was terrified her mother-in-law would faint as a result of the venom now coursing through her arms as the two waited for help to arrive. They put the dead copperhead in a small plastic bowl to carry to the hospital with them, still unsure of what kind of snake they'd been dealing with.

"I told her, that's a copperhead," Linda recalls. "She said, 'No, if it was poisonous, I'd be dead.'"

Ambulance drivers were immediately able to identify the snake's characteristic markings when they arrived on the scene.

Though bites from a copperhead rarely prove deadly, Gladys was at high risk. Not only was she already frail from other ailments, she had multiple bites. By the time she reached Norton Community Hospital, her blood pressure was dropping low, and Gladys was shivering.

Doctors decided almost immediately to transport Gladys to Johnson City Medical Center. When she reached the Tennessee hospital, Shortt was admitted to the intensive care unit and given a brand-new antivenin drug called Cro-Fab, Linda said.

"They'd only had it a couple of months," Linda said of the new drug that helped her mother-in-law survive the snake bites.

During the three weeks Gladys stayed in the hospital, both of her arms swelled more than twice their size, with dark black and blue bruising. She says her hands were numb for a time, but now most of the swelling has receded and she has regained full use of her hands.

The only lingering effects Shortt feels are some residual swelling and slight nerve damage, which she says occasionally makes her arms and elbows feel like they're coated with spider webs.

Doctors, patients and other visitors in the hospital who had heard of Shortt's struggle flocked to see "the snake lady" at Johnson City Medical Center, Linda said. In her words, Gladys had "created quite a sensation."

She's created a sensation in Pound, too. Members of the small community, friends and strangers alike, have been passing on the story, and stopping by to help with groceries or other needs as Gladys has recovered.

Shortt says she believes she could do it all again, if she needed to. Linda disagrees.

"If we did have to do it again, I'd bring a gun next time," Linda said with a grimace.

Holy crap, that's incredible. I would have gotten the hell outta there after the first bite.

AP Photo of Gladys Short:

Old people are badasses.

Of course, how else would they have managed to live that long?