A Washington state man got an unpleasant surprise while shopping at Walmart when what he thought was a stick turned out to be a rattlesnake — and bit him.
Mica Craig, a 47-year-old married father of two, was shopping for mulch in the Clarkston, Wash., store's outdoor garden area for the medical marijuana he is licensed to grow.
"I reached down to grab the stick to move it out of the way, and the snake stretched out, turned around and got its fangs in my right hand," he said.
"When I shook it and heard the rattles, I knew it was a rattlesnake and then I freaked. I was screaming bloody murder through the parking lot," he told local radio station KIRO.
"I slung it off and I did a tap dance on it until it was dead," he added.
Another shopper, Maria Geffre, saw Craig fall to the ground afterward, yelling that he had been bitten by a snake, and rushed to his aid.
"He had punctures on his hand and there was the dead rattler he'd stomped on," she said, adding that the snake had four rattles.
She left her husband waiting in their pick-up truck, jumped in Craig's car and drove him to the hospital in the next town over, just across the Snake River in Idaho, the Lewiston Tribune reported.
Craig said emergency room doctors sent him home at first because he had little swelling and the bite appeared not to have any venom.
But he said his hand swelled up to the size of a grapefruit afterward, and he went back to the hospital, where he said he was treated with six bags of anti-venom.
"As of right now, my little finger doesn't move at all and my ring finger barely moves. I'm hoping it's just swelling," he told KIRO.
"I don’t know if I’ll ever go back to Walmart," he added.
Walmart apologized for the incident and said it would look into the matter. Craig said Walmart had told him a pest control company was clearing the area and had found other snakes, according to the Tribune.
