June Nobile was barefoot in her sandals that the Easter bunny had left for her earlier that Sunday morning.
The 7 year old was playing with over a dozen other kids at a crawfish boil at a property in Humphreys County on Easter Sunday when she felt the fangs of a cottonmouth water moccasin sink into her skin near the arch of her foot.
“The kids were playing in that area for probably an hour and a half to two hours,” her father, Will Nobile, said. “I don’t know if the snake was there the whole time or had just shown up, but it was laying in the middle of the yard, by a sidewalk, near a big fountain.”
The yard was cut, he said, and well manicured, but she did not see the snake prior to the bite.
“I stepped on it,” she told The Enterprise-Tocsin a couple of weeks removed from the terrifying and painful ordeal.
The Nobiles are no strangers to snakes. They live in the country just west of Moorhead, and the family has for decades owned and operated catfish ponds.
“About 99% of the snakes that we see out here are banded water snakes,” Will said.
June said that after she felt the bite that she looked down and saw the snake, still latched to her foot. She had to shake her leg to get it to let go.
“It opened its mouth after it bit me…I ran and told mama,” she said.
Her mother, Olivia Nobile, was nearby with friends.
“She ran right up to me, and she was real upset, and she said, ‘Mama, a big snake just bit me,’” she said. “I saw two little marks with blood coming out of them, so I knew that she was right.”
June pointed in the direction of the snake, and it was quickly located and neutralized.
“They said, ‘Y’all need to get in the car and go to the hospital, it’s a (venomous) cottonmouth,’” Will said. “We actually never did see the snake.”
Olivia said that everyone at the gathering jumped into action, helping in any way they could.
They loaded June into the car and were able to leave their other two children there with friends.
Will called Indianola physician Dr. Wade Dowell.
Since they were already in Humphreys County, Dowell advised them to go to the emergency room in Jackson.
“We were already that way,” Olivia said.
Speed limits and traffic lights had to be ignored.
“We were wide open all the way there,” Will said.
It was during that drive down when the pain for June really started to set in.
“It didn’t start swelling up her leg until we got (to the hospital),” Olivia said. “She kept saying that it was hurting, and they say they worry about pain and not so much swelling with a snake bite…She was in a lot of pain. I think that it was really painful. She cried and cried.”
For June, there was a mix of terrible pain and also the not knowing.
“I was just nervous,” June said. “It hurt so bad, though.”
Once in the emergency room, the staff gave June strong pain medicine.
“They gave her fentanyl when we first got there, and that did not even touch it,” Olivia said. “She was still crying, so they gave her morphine a few hours later, and she finally settled down a little bit.”
It took time for the anti-venom to be converted from a powder form to a liquid. Around 9 p.m. that night, June received the first of two rounds.
There are four vials in each round, Will said, so she received in total eight vials of anti-venom that evening.
After the first round, the swelling still seemed to be moving toward June’s knee. When doctors administered the second round, the swelling subsided and she was moved to a room at around 1 a.m. that Monday morning.
Later that afternoon, June was released to go home.
June was not the only patient at that hospital that night who had been bitten by a venomous snake, Olivia said. The staff there said that nearly a dozen snake bites had been treated at that facility alone this year.
It would be nearly a full week before June would be able to put weight on her foot again.
“By that Friday, she could put just a little bit of weight on it,” Will said.
Now, weeks later, June is back to her normal self, spending her afternoons playing outside in the country.
She’s looking down toward the ground a little more often than before.
She’s not alone.
“Everybody who was (at the crawfish boil that Sunday) has been much more cautious,” Olivia said.
