Again thanks for the wishes. I arrived back in SA at 10h00 this morning and have been through a battery of blood tests etc, which hopefully I should have the results tomorrow.
Yesterday morning 24hours after the bite, I did a urinalysis and there was a significant amount of urobilinogen and billirubin showing in my urine, which is indicative of haemolysis (the breaking down of blood cells). This appears to have cleared up today so hopefully that’s the last of that. So far my kidney function seems to be normal and other than a little tenderness around the bite wound and a nagging headache (which is pretty normal for me anyway so not sure of the significance of that) I feel fine, although strenuous activity does tire me out faster than normal and my pulse rate has not been less than 95/min since I was bitten. Normally my resting pulse is around 60-64/min and even waking up from sleep it is still sitting at around 98/min.
Below are some pics, the first two of the snake that bit me, apologies for them being not the best quality but I had other things on my mind when I was taking them and quite a tremor going at the time

… as you can see, it is still relatively tiny, I’d estimate the head size to be not bigger than the end of my pinky finger, although it had a huge gape.


The bite site +1 hour. The single fang mark is quite clear roughly in the centre of the reddened area, which is the area that I got the goose bumps initially. This reddened area was quite a bit more sensitive than the rest of my skin, and would become extremely tender over the next day. It never raised higher than the surrounding skin though.

The bite site +24 hours. Not really much change visually although as I said it was a lot more sensitive to pressure feeling badly bruised.

At the moment the reddened area has all but vanished other than the faintest ring demarcating where the edge was. The area immediately around the fang mark has turned slightly brown-grey like, a bruise for about 6mm in diameter. It is still a bit tender to pressure but seems better. My sublingual glands are still slightly inflamed and tender, but other than what I mentioned above about being easily fatigued I feel fine.
I will put up the blood results if there is anything worth putting up as well as a timeline of the onset and resolution of symptoms for your info. This incident has created quite a sh!t storm up on the site, with the powers that be now investigating the whole matter. Obviously there is some upset about the fact that I am handling snakes without a “professional certification”, as well as why I was not using all the protective equipment and the appropriate snake catching instruments. I am the first to agree that not having hand protection on was negligent on my part – my 1st mistake – regardless I was not bitten anywhere near my hand, so wearing those would have not likely resulted in a different outcome in this instance. I have explained to them that the 1.2m grab stick and 1.5m hook stick would have been rather difficult to use on such a small snake, underneath a 6m container sitting 20cm off the ground on concrete blocks with the snake stuck up between the top of the concrete block and the base of the container, but somewhere this argument falls on deaf ears. I’ll worry about that when I get back to work though. I guess it’s another case of people being quite happy for you to deal with the problem (like the 15-odd venomous snakes I have already removed without incident off the site) until something occurs then it’s all your fault and you need to be taken to task. Ah well… such is the attitude of the ignorant.