By Zack Harold
Charleston Daily Mail
CHARLESTON, W. Va. — A Logan woman who spent weeks in a Morgantown hospital for a copperhead bite will enjoy the holidays at home.
Tara Williams, 21, was in Ruby Memorial Hospital’s intensive care unit just two weeks ago but is fully alert and talking now. She returned home last Wednesday, the night before Thanksgiving.
“It was great. It was the best feeling. It felt so good to come home and sleep in my bed,” she said.
Doctors allowed her to go home because her mother, Mitzi, is a registered nurse and can maintain the antibiotic IV drip still in her arm.
She still requires constant care because she can’t walk on her own. Her right foot is still paralyzed. But things are improving.
Williams lost 20 pounds during her three-week hospital stay because she either had no appetite or couldn’t keep anything down.
“I’d eat a roll or a bite of mashed potatoes. Nothing tasted right once I got off the ventilator. I didn’t want to eat,” she said.
On Tuesday, Williams and her boyfriend went to lunch at Taco Bell.
“I’m doing a lot better,” she said.
Williams was on a bow-hunting trip in Ritchie County when she was bitten. She, her boyfriend and three others arrived at the hunting camp on Monday, Oct. 1.
Williams, who has been hunting since she was 16, said she saw a few deer during the trip but didn’t kill anything.
The group originally planned to leave that Wednesday but decided to spend one more day at the camp. On Thursday morning, Williams woke before everyone else and took a walk outside.
She stepped on the copperhead when she was heading back to the cabin. It wrapped around her leg and bit her twice.
Williams said she’s not very good at identifying snakes but was almost sure she’d just encountered a copperhead.
“I knew it wasn’t a black snake. It wasn’t a rattlesnake. I knew that. It had to be a copperhead.
“I kind of stood there for a second, then I started kicking my legs. It was stuck on my ankle.”
When the snake finally let go, Williams looked down and noticed her leg was bleeding.
“Instantly, I couldn’t walk on it,” she said.
She hopped in the house and woke her boyfriend. She told him a snake had bitten her and they immediately headed to Sistersville General Hospital, about a half-hour away.
“All the way to hospital, I was just calm. I know people say not to freak out when you get bit,” she said.
Unfortunately, Williams would not receive any antivenin for several more hours.
When she arrived at the Sistersville hospital, staff placed ice on her leg and gave her a pain shot.
Doctors said they’d wait an hour to see if the bites caused swelling. An hour and a half later, half of Williams’ leg and her foot were swollen and starting to bruise.
More than two hours after she had arrived, Sistersville emergency room staff decided Williams needed to go to a different hospital. They called an ambulance to take her to Ruby Memorial in Morgantown, about two hours away.
The trip actually took two and a half hours, Williams said, because the ambulance got stuck in traffic.
Ruby Memorial doctors rushed Williams into their emergency room. They hooked her to an IV, gave her another pain shot and, after about an hour, transferred her to the hospital’s trauma unit to administer antivenin.
She went home to Logan three days later, on Sunday, Nov. 6.
“The trauma doctor called on Monday and asked if we could bring her back on Tuesday and let him look at her leg,” Mitzi Williams said.
The doctor ordered her daughter into emergency surgery as soon as she arrived. Williams’ wounds had swelled, and surgeons had to cut her leg open to relieve the pressure.
“I started crying as soon as they said I was going to have to have surgery. I was thinking, I don’t want scars on my legs,” she said.
The surgery went fine. Doctors took Williams back into surgery the following Monday so doctors could close incisions on one side of her leg.
She started getting sick the next day, however, and began experiencing a high fever, chills, nausea and vomiting. She was moved to the hospital’s intensive care unit Tuesday evening.
Surgeons reopened her wounds Wednesday morning and discovered one of the muscles in her leg had died. Williams was now experiencing Toxic Shock Syndrome, a potentially fatal condition caused by certain kinds of staphylococcus infections.
Williams, a trained respiratory therapist, said she remembers everything that happened until doctors placed her on the ventilator. She said she knew her health was headed downhill when she started breathing 50 times a minute and her heart was beating 160 times a minute.
“It was really scary,” she said.
She spent two and a half days on a ventilator. At the time, doctors were pumping five different antibiotics through her system, Mitzi said.
She left the intensive care unit on Friday and was soon alert and talking. By that time, she’d become a near-celebrity. Television stations and newspapers around the state reported on her recovery.
“Whenever I woke up from being on the vent, my mom was like, ‘You’re on the news!’ ” she said. “I cannot believe it was that big of a deal.”
Mitzi, who works in Logan Regional Hospital’s intensive care unit, said her hospital has treated about 17 snakebites this year. Most patients don’t experience symptoms like her daughter’s.
“It’s usually swelling, then everything starts to go down,” she said.
She suspects her daughter’s delayed treatment caused most of her problems. By the time she received the antivenin, “it was too late to turn it around,” she said.
Williams still doesn’t know how much nerve damage the snakebites caused and won’t know until she starts physical therapy next week.
In the meantime, Mitzi said the family’s friends and neighbors have stepped up to support the family. Mitzi’s coworkers at the hospital have raffled baskets to help cover travel expenses.
Other friends started a fund at Logan Bank and Trust to pay for her expenses.
Logan’s fire chief even fixed the whole family Thanksgiving dinner. Williams’ brother, Greg, is a firefighter for the city.
“I didn’t expect it. He brought the whole entire dinner, dessert and all. Everybody’s been wonderful,” Mitzi said.
Mail donations to: Logan Bank and Trust, c/o Tara Williams Recovery Fund, P.O. Box 597, Logan, WV 25601.
Copyright 2011 Charleston Newspapers