PAPUA NEW GUINEA SNAKEBITE PROJECT
NOT QUITE AN UNEVENTFUL DAY

Eventully Dave Matthews and his two off-siders arrived with a snake bag. He said it was a large snake and it had been trying to bite everything it came into contact with, so we decided not to check its injury until we got back to the Snek Haus. Owen called his wife Mary, a medical doctor and skilled surgeon, to ask her to meet us in case the snake needed to have its wound sutured.

We collect the Papuan blacksnake, Pseudechis papuanus, from David Matthews and his crew at Frog Pond	Back at the Snek haus we accessed the snake's condition with Dr Mary Paiva

Back at the Snek Haus we dropped the Papuan blacksnake into a plastic sack for examination. Mary, and Roseanne, arrived to examined the snake. The posterior wound David Matthews had mentioned was relatively superficial, the skin was peeled back but there was not other apparent damage and it was nothing a few sutures would not fix. But there was another wound, much more serious and certainly life threatening, on the anterior of the body, one that would have been hidden from Dave while he hung onto the posterior third as the snake was being extracted.

A large area of skin had been peeled back exposing and breaking ribs, tearing muscle and exposing the lung which, miraculously, appeared unharmed. We thought the spine was broken, there was certainly a large dip in the back, but the posterior of the body and the tail responded well to stimuli and appeared unaffected. We hoped with quick surgery we could save the snake, which was simply huge, a good 2.0 m long, and seemed to be a gravid female.

The anterior wound is serious, there is consiiderable muscle damage and loss, and the lung is exposed, but not punctured. There is little blood loss.	We start the two-hour operationto save the Papuan blacksnake

The five of us embarked on a two-hour operation to try and save this superb specimen, Mary executing some marvellous suturing where muscle and scales had been completely lost.

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