Biters & bloodsuckers: Ozark Countians have too-close encounters with venomous snakes, spiders and a leech

<p class="p1">As wonderful as it is to live in Ozark County, challenges do occur from time to time. The recent flood is one notable example. And then there are the biters and bloodsuckers ...  </p><p class="p4">Last weekend a couple of those heinous villains found their mark in two women who would have preferred they hadn’t. For one of the women, this go-round was just the latest of several biter and bloodsucker encounters she and her husband have experienced.</p><p class="p1"><strong>‘It totally freaked me out’</strong></p><p class="p4">Rachel Donley, wife of Ozark County Western District Commissioner Greg Donley, said she was with her daughter at Little Creek, near their home in the Thornfield area, lying in the sun on the creek bank with her feet in the water when the creepy bloodsucker found her. </p><p class="p4">She didn’t notice anything until later, when she was back in the house getting ready to bathe. “I saw it when I got in the tub, and it moved,” she said in an online message to the <em>Times. </em></p><p class="p4">The “it” that moved was a leech attached to her foot.</p><p class="p4">“It totally freaked me out,” Rachel said. “I called my husband and told him to come home right away. He removed it. I had to close my eyes. I hate bugs anyway, but a leech! Oh my gosh! Bleh!”</p><p class="p4">Rachel said the leech’s bite “did not bleed” and “did not ever even hurt.” </p><p class="p4">She suspects the leech attached itself to her foot as she lay on the creek bank with her feet in the shallow water. “I wasn’t even swimming. Thank goodness!” Rachel said. “Who knows where the leech would have gone!”</p><p class="p1"><strong>Spider, copperhead and tick bites</strong></p><p class="p4">Jule Kruger was outside Sunday, checking on the new solar panels that were being installed at the Isabella-area home she shares with husband Jon, when the copperhead bit her. “I didn’t see it at first. I just turned around after I felt the pain. It was full-size, coiled up,” said Jule, who turns 64 next week.</p><p class="p4">Jon and the solar panel installer rushed her inside the house, “and by the time they got back outside to look for it, it was gone,” she said.</p><p class="p4">Most people might have immediately rushed to the hospital, but Jule decided to wait awhile. After all, she and Jon are experienced biter victims. In fact, Sunday was four years <em>to the day</em> since Jon was also bitten by a copperhead at their home. And since then, they’ve both been bitten by brown recluse spiders. Jule was bitten by a black widow spider too. And she currently has Lyme disease, a tick-borne illness.</p><p class="p4">Oh, the special thrill of living in the beautiful Ozarks!</p><p class="p4">The Krugers had lived “all over” the U.S., they said Monday, before moving to Ozark County about 10 years ago. They spent two years at the East Wind Community and then settled on their own place, carving a homestead out of undeveloped land off County Road 818 between Isabella and Nottinghill.</p><p class="p4">Jon was bitten by the copperhead late on a dark, moonless night in 2013 when he was wearing sandals and carrying the family’s dog, a Chihuahua, to his adult son’s cabin nearby. </p><p class="p4">“I had a flashlight. But it stopped working. I knew to worry about copperheads. But after the flashlight stopped working, I decided to keep going. And it bit me <em>one step</em> after I decided to keep going,” he said. “In fact, it bit me twice, so I got a lot of venom. I had three fang marks on my left foot. It was really painful for a while.”</p><p class="p4">He and Jule rushed to the emergency room at Baxter Regional Medical Center in Mountain Home, Arkansas.</p><p class="p4">“But it was expensive, and they really didn’t do much,” Jule said, explaining why they didn’t immediately go to the hospital Sunday after she was bitten.</p><p class="p4">Jon said when he was bitten in 2013 and went to BRMC, “They admitted me overnight and watched me until 12 hours were up. They gave me a tetanus shot and an antibiotic and morphine. Hospitals don’t really do antivenin much anymore.”</p><p class="p4">Two years after his ER visit, Jon got a hospital bill for $2,500.</p><p class="p4">A military veteran, he contested the charge and resubmitted his VA coverage to the hospital about six months ago; he hasn’t heard anything about it since then and hopes the matter is settled. Still, the thought of another big bill made the Krugers reluctant to go back to the ER if they could possibly avoid it.</p><p class="p4">About a year after the copperhead bite, Jon was bitten by a brown recluse. He was treated at a VA clinic with a sulfa-based ointment that helped. So when Jule was bitten by a brown recluse about a year after that, she didn’t go to the doctor at first and instead used some of the sulfa ointment left over from Jon’s bite. </p><p class="p4">“I didn’t know it at the time, but it turns out I’m allergic to sulfa drugs, and that messed me up even more than the bite,” she said. “I ended up having to have a skin graft!”</p><p class="p4">And a year after that, she had the encounter with the black widow spider. “I had a sweet potato I was starting in a glass of water outside. One day, I took it out of the water and started peeling off the slips, and a black widow had made a nest in one of the slips. It bit me on the back of the hand,” Jule said, adding that, of all the bites she’s experienced, the black widow’s was the most painful.</p><p class="p4">“It affects your nervous system,” she said. “It bit me on my hand. My hand felt fine, but my legs gave me lots of problems.”</p><p class="p4">She sought treatment at the Missouri Ozarks Community Health clinic in Ava, where she was given Demerol, but even that wasn’t strong enough to cut the pain, she said. “It was the weirdest sensation. There was no swelling, but the pain in my legs lasted five days, and my feet were clammy. And then, there was no feeling at all in my feet for a while.” </p><p class="p4">With all those bite experiences under their belts, or skin, the Krugers decided to stay home Sunday after the copperhead bit Jule. They called their neighbor, Eric Hinderberger, who had also been bitten by a copperhead a couple of years ago.</p><p class="p4">“He brought Benedryl and gave us the number for Missouri Poison Control,” Jule said. “We called the number, and they said wash it, pat it dry and keep it elevated, but not above the level of the heart. They told us <em>not</em> to put ice on it, and every half hour they wanted us to put a mark where the swelling was so we could calculate how fast it was moving up my leg.”</p><p class="p4">The Krugers stayed in touch with poison control that day and into the evening. At one point, the adviser told them, “I think you should go to the hospital.” </p><p class="p4">Jon answered, “Call us back in an hour.” </p><p class="p4">Given that they’d had experience with bites, and considering the long drive to the hospital and that Jule’s foot would be down on the floor of their vehicle instead of elevated as they traveled, they decided to wait a while longer.</p><p class="p4">“Poison Control called every hour,” Jon said. “They were really good.”</p><p class="p4">He put activated charcoal on Jule’s foot. And another friend, Chrystal Marshall, brought a device called an ionic cleanse machine that helped a lot, Jule said.</p><p class="p4">“You fill it with water and put salt in the water for conductivity, and then I soaked my foot in it,” said Jule. “When you start, the water is clear, and then, after a half hour, it’s rust colored or a different colored. It helped a lot.”</p><p class="p4">She had used a different friend’s ionic cleanse machine after the black widow bite and had gotten relief from the pain then, so she was glad to use the machine again after the snakebite.</p><p class="p4">By Monday, when Jule talked to the <em>Times,</em> her foot was better, she said, although the photos she shared showed that it was still badly swollen. Despite being temporarily incapacitated, she and Jon can still laugh about all their experiences with the Ozarks’ venomous and bloodsucking critters. And, they say, they aren’t ready to heed the advice of Jule’s mother, who lives in Raleigh, North Carolina. After she heard about the couple’s latest bite, “she said we need to move back to civilization,” Jule said, laughing.</p><p class="p4"><em>To contact Missouri Point Control, call 800-222-1222.</em></p>

<p class="p1">Isabella-area resident Jule Kruger who’s currently taking an antibiotic for treatment of Lyme disease, was bitten on the left foot Sunday by a copperhead. This close-up photo shows the snake’s fang marks on Jule’s left foot and some of the marks she made Sunday to calculate how fast and how far the swelling was spreading.</p>

<p class="p1">Rachel Donley, pictured above left with husband Ozark County Western Commissioner Greg Donley, was horrified to find this leech stuck to her foot Sunday after she returned home from Little Creek.</p>