Couple months ago while spraying woody weeds at my lake house in New South Wales, I felt something strike my left leg. This was odd since I was standing still at the time. So I looked down to catch a glimpse of what appeared to be the tail of a brown snake disappearing into the long grass.

Concerned, I retreated a safe distance, ripped apart the Velcro on my gaiter and pulled up the trouser leg. There I was confronted with a single puncture wound just above the top of the gaiter. FCUK! I am now a dead man walking. You see, Australia’s eastern brown snake is the second most venomous snake in the world. And a single bite can kill an adult in less than 30 minutes.

In moments like this, Bear Grylls would advise: “Stay calm and assess your situation”. Trouble is, my situation is not great. I know the best thing I can do for myself is apply a compression bandage to my leg, stay still, call for help and wait for the cavalry to arrive. I don’t have a compression bandage with me, but there is one in the house. My wife is in Sydney visiting my son who is working there as a paramedic. I am at least 50 metres from the house on steep, wooded terrain with no path or stairs or vehicle access. I am a 40 minute drive to the nearest regional hospital with anti-venom. And I am two hours’ by road to a hospital with an intensive care unit. I do have my cell phone though.

So I now have a number of tough decisions to make. Do I call my wife Jay and son Ben to say goodbye while I still can? Do I call emergency and sit in the bush waiting to be stretchered out and transferred to hospital? Depending on response time I could be dead on arrival. Do I walk down to the house, apply the compression bandage I know is there and drive myself to hospital? If I jump in my WRX and drive it at its cruising speed of 100 miles an hour I can be there in 30 minutes-likely with highway patrol in pursuit. That’s provided the toxic effects of snake venom don’t kick in along the way. What to do? And the clock is ticking.

In that moment in time, I decided I would walk down to the house, apply the compression bandage and drive myself to hospital. But by the time I get down to the house I’m dripping sweat and have a crushing pain in the chest. And I have no way of knowing if this is the snake venom starting to paralyze my heart or the anxiety of being confronted with my own mortality.

Not now confident I can drive myself to hospital and actually make it, I apply the compression bandage and call emergency. On explaining my situation an ambulance is despatched, priority one: lights and sirens. But this is regional Australia and the allocated crew is on a job a long way from where I am. So it’s now a waiting game. Waiting to see who arrives first. The paramedics or the Grim Reaper.

Now that I’m in the house, sitting quietly with a compression bandage on my leg, my symptoms don’t appear to be progressing and may even be improving. Which is fortunate for me. Because it took more than half an hour for the paramedics to arrive.

After carrying out an initial assessment, the treating paramedic reassured me by telling me something I already knew: if it was a ‘wet’ bite from an eastern brown I’d already be dead. You see, the eastern brown snake doesn’t always inject venom. It saves its venom for its prey or for situations in which it is seriously threatened. Confident in its lethality, it’s possible its strike on me was a warning shot: “Don’t mess with me or I WILL kill you”. Or maybe the fact that the top of my gaiter caught one of its fangs forced an abrupt change of plan. Only God knows.

At this point, based on elapsed time and absence of severe symptoms, my situation is no longer a slam dunk for the Grim Reaper. But I’m not out of the woods yet. I need to go to hospital for pathology to make sure there is nothing weird going on with my blood. So it’s into the ambulance for the 40 minute ride to Cooma hospital. There, blood is taken. An hour later the pathology results come back and are reassuring. But there is an issue. Snake bite treatment protocol requires that further blood tests must be carried out one hour, six hours and 12 hours after the compression bandage is removed. This must be done in a hospital with a 24 hour pathology department and an intensive care unit, neither of which Cooma hospital has. So I’m loaded into the back of another ambulance for the road trip to the nation’s capital: Canberra.

At six that evening, roughly 8 hours after incident, the compression bandage is removed by an emergency department doctor at Canberra hospital. Blood pathology is done at 7pm that evening, and 1am and 7am the following morning. After which, I’m given the all clear. At 8am that morning I walked out of the ER into the glorious Canberra sunshine. Completely trashed but very happy to be alive.

There’s an image I believe Rory McLaren concocted for his awareness campaign about fluid injection injury. I hope you’ve seen it. It features a hydraulic hose and a viper baring its fangs. I have to tell you I will never see that image in the same way again. And I can’t decide which is the lesser of two evils: fluid injection or snake bite. Because both are medical emergencies. And both can have truly horrendous consequences. So NEVER use your hands to check for leaks. And ALWAYS wear gaiters when hiking, hunting or working in the bush. Because you never know what you’re going to meet.

I will never forget the last thing the ambulance despatcher said to me as we ended our call: “good luck”. It was the way that she said it. Like she knew I probably wasn’t going to make it. Well, I was lucky. Which leads me to my other point: don’t put off until tomorrow what you can do today. Because you never know what’s coming down the pike.

Seize the day in 2025.