The United States is home to four kinds of poisonous snakes, and if one of them bites you, making the right moves immediately afterward could be the difference between life and death.
Chiquita Boyd learned the hard way how to react to a snake bite. As she was getting out of her car at her parents' home, a copperhead bit her.
"All I remember is this excruciating pain," Boyd recalled. "I saw a snake and it was still coiled and it was like, still rising. So from that, I took off running, screaming into my parents' house."
Boyd was taken to the hospital and given five rounds of anti-snake venom before her team of doctors were certain they had gotten it all.
She said she'll never forget what that pain felt like.
"It felt like it was in slow motion," she described. "A knife went through my foot and slowly pulled out of my foot. There were like, two piercing dots...and had this drop of blood oozing out of them."
The next several minutes were a blur, Boyd said.
"My mom, she said I started tearing off clothes," she said. "I was trying to do anything to cool off. I couldn't sit still."
That was her first mistake, said Boyd. Whenever you get bitten by a snake, you're supposed to keep calm and stay still.
"The more I move, the more the venom would move in my body," she said.
They also put ice on the bite - another mistake. Instead, you should make a tourniquet near the site of the bite.
Boyd learned, "you tie it real tight and sort of keep the venom where it is."
Copyright 2013 America Now. All rights reserved.
