Two good ole boys were out in the woods hunting when one needed to take a bio break. He went behind some bushes, dropped his pants and began to do his business. A rattlesnake, upset about being disturbed, bit him in the butt.*

"Billy Bob! I've been bit by a snake! What do I do?"

Billy Bob looked at the situation and said, "You rest easy, Bubba. I'll run to town and ask the doctor what to do."

Billy Bob ran 3 miles to town, found the doctor, and told him what happened. The doctor said, "You need to take this razor and make a cut across the bite, then suck out the venom. If you don't do that, he'll die before you can get him to town. I'd go with you but Betty Joe is about to give birth." **

Billy Bob ran the 3 miles back to Bubba and told him, "Sorry, Bubba, but the doctor says you're gonna die!"

* This actually happened to an Army buddy of mine when he was in Viet Nam, only it wasn't a rattlesnake that got him, it was a Bamboo Pit Viper (a very deadly snake). He grabbed the snake and ran back to his unit. They called a med-evac helicopter and flew him to the hospital, never letting go of the snake. He said, "When I inprocessed incountry, they told me there were 100 kinds of snakes in Nam. 99 of them were poisonous and the other would squeeze you to death. If you didn't get the snake, they wouldn't know what kind of anti-venom to give you and you'd die. He was squeezing the snake so hard that it was dead by the time he got to the hospital.

A couple years later, he was on a field exercise in the South. He reached to remove a piece of wood from a woodpile and a rattlesnake bit him on the hand. Of course, his nickname in the unit was "Snakebite."

** That was the old concept for snakebite first aid. They don't recommend that any more.