An animal-loving dad was nearly killed when he tried to rescue what turned out to be a very dangerous animal from the middle of a busy road.
Joey Ricciardella, of Connecticut, was on his way back to his home in Torrington after dropping his four-year-old daughter off with her 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 backseat, placed it over the snake’s head and picked it up to move it, WFSB reports.
But the animal in peril was a venomous Timber rattlesnake and when Ricciardella went to grab it, the lethal reptile bit his hand.
Joey Ricciardella, of Torrington, was on his way home from 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 almost trying to make a funny voice, like at first I thought he was messing with me,’ Brittany Hilmeyer, the mother of his four-year-old, said of her conversation with him afterwards.
She explained that she is used to Ricciardella being a jokester, but soon realized something was seriously wrong.
‘He was getting to the point where he really couldn’t talk. You couldn’t understand him,’ she said.
‘It was like trying to talk to someone with a mouth full of marbles.’
Hilmeyer did not know at the time, but the venom from the snake bite was affecting his ability to breathe.
She added that she was not surprised when she later found out Ricciardella went out of his way to help the snake.
‘He’s had a bat in his house with a broken wing at one point that he was trying to fix,’ she recounted.
‘Last week, it was a baby bunny.’
The venomous snake bit his hand, causing him to have trouble breathing
Ricciardella tried wrapping the snake’s head in a shirt from his car and tried to move it out of the way of the busy street
Ricciardella somehow was able to make it back to his car and drove himself to the nearest hospital – where doctors determined that his respiratory system was failing and he went into cardiac arrest.
But due to a short supply of anti-venom at the Charlotte Hungerford Hospital in Torrington, he had to be moved to Hartford Hospital in the state capital.
‘A lot of hospitals, I guess it’s not common to carry large amounts of anti-venom,’ Hilmeyer said.
‘So that was part of the problem when he went to the first hospital. The second hospital was having more flown in.’
Ricciardella is an animal lover who once tried to help a bat with a broken wing
There are only two venomous snakes that live in Connecticut: the Northern Copperhead and the Timber rattlesnake, whose bites could be fatal.
The Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection recommends that anyone who encounters either species, observe it from a distance and back away slowly.
But Ricciardella was lucky, and is said to be doing well in the hospital after suffering from not only the venom, but also a life-threatening allergic reaction that caused him to be placed in a medically induced coma, according to an online fundraiser set up to pay for his medical bills.
‘There have been improvements, but the medical bills are piling up and he has no insurance as he’s 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 he won’t be sedated so heavily anymore.
‘That’s when he’ll be able to talk.’