Snakes in the toilet

Today seemed like a normal day. I walked Min to preschool, I chatted to the staff and then I went home to catch up on house work. Then the phone rang. It was Matt; “so I’m ringing so you hear this from me first…”. Yeah that sounds pretty ominous, right? “Riiiiiight……”, “Min found a snake today. He went into the toilets and there was a baby brown snake in the toilet. He went straight out and told Tarsha and Josephine and they dealt with it; so he did an amazing thing. ” At this point in feeling absolutely sick. Not because Min had been bitten – he’s absolutely fine. Whilst I should have been focusing on the fact that my parenting led him to make the decision, rather than to go and look, touch, pick- up, whatever! He made the choice to go immediately to the teacher. And that’s pretty impressive for a just-turned-4 year old. But I couldn’t move past that sick “what if” feeling in my stomach. What if he’d gone in for a closer look? For the record, my point of reference is my 7 years of Emergency experience – and even though most snake bites are either non-envenomated or “stick-bites”, brown snakes are amongst the most agressive and most deadly snakes. Baby brown snakes are even more dangerous because being juvenile, they tend to panic and bite more often and envenomate their victim more often than their older counterparts. So while I sit here, still sick with worry over what ifs; the fact is my kid did something pretty amazing today – and he helped to keep his little preschool mates safe too. He hopped off the bus and came rushing up to tell me about the snake! “And it was flapping and wiggling!!” Apparently this little dude was pretty aggressive!! So counting my lucky stars tonight – had he been bitten and envenomated, and being so remote, he may well have died. Just another thing that made me question out decision to move bush…. But there are snakes in the city, right?