A Middle Tennessee man almost lost one of his fingers after he was bitten by a rattlesnake.
According to WZTV, doctors believe Austin McGee of Franklin was bitten by a baby timber rattlesnake.
“It was just kind of a freak accident,” McGee told WZTV. “I honestly never thought that a rattlesnake bite wasn’t that big of a deal.”
McGee says it happened while he and a friend were working in the woods.
“I heard something, it sounded like a faint little rattle,” said McGee’s friend Noah Hammer. “Must just be a bug or something because it wasn’t that loud.”
That’s when the snake bit McGee. He says he didn’t even see it.
Over the next few days, his wound got worse and his finger swelled to an extremely large size.
“It progressively kept getting worse and then they popped it and it went back down and then the skin around it kept coming off,” McGee told WZTV. “It was like a throbbing, it was beating with my heart every time.”
McGee thought he was losing his finger, but doctors believe he will make a full recovery.