Rattlin' on! Nerves are necessary to hunt rattlesnakes

Neuropathy can kill serious outdoor pursuits, but treatments can help

A western diamondback rattlesnake recently captured by the author is coiled to strike. It checks its surroundings using its tongue and rattles to warn anyone approaching. Photo by Kelly Bostian/KJBOutdoors

It felt good to stand on the precipice of a rocky ledge again.

I wasn’t going too overboard; the drop below was only 10 feet or so, and this rock was solid, level, and Caddilac-sized, but the barren trees of mid-March allowed a full and open view across the valley, and I paused to soak in that feeling of freedom.

“Yer Rattlin’ on Bostian! Rattlin’ on!”

My buddy Tim Fitzer shouted from somewhere up higher on the ridge. He’s the guy they called the “wild man” on Discovery Channel’s Venom Hunters in 2016—a wild man among wild people. Tim says he was “discovered” because of a Tulsa World column and video I did with him 11 years ago: “Catching and Bagging a 6-foot Rattlesnake.” It has something like 4 million views on YouTube now.

Fitzer’s mountainside voice carries.

I met Fitzer soon after moving from Alaska to Oklahoma, and he was anxious to introduce me to his greatest outdoor passion. I was worried about venomous snakes, having never been around them, so I felt I needed to learn. I couldn’t have found a better teacher.

So every year, when the sun starts to tickle elm leaves from their buds and wakes south-facing, rocky slopes from their winter slumber, I try to find at least one day to join Fitzer and look for rattlesnakes as they emerge from their dens to lie on the rocks, feel that warmth, and maybe ambush a meal if they’re lucky.

Finding them gets the heart racing, and in some of the areas Fitzer hunts, just walking can be a little dicey. The possibility of a fall is always there for the most sure-footed, and on top of that, the last thing you want to do is spot a snake and then trip face-first into it.

The author handles a fat, healthy western diamondback rattlesnake, roughly 5 feet long, near a rocky ridge in southeastern Oklahoma.

Taking a time-out

Last year, I realized I couldn’t feel my feet well enough to go rattlesnake hunting. Neuropathy that started out as an annoying feeling, like the balls of my feet were numb or tingly at least six years earlier, had progressed to the point I had become a complete clutz in the woods. I first wrote about last year in All Things on March 26.

The week I should have been clambering across jagged rocks and grabbing rattlers, I instead walked into Neurogen Medical’s office off Mingo Road to put my feet on vibrating machines and into ShockWave therapy. Treatment included some at-home gadgets used for waking up my piggies with infrared heat and electric shock therapy for at least an hour a day, if not two, for the next year.

Some days it was a pain real pain in the butt to sit there with my feet in the water bath for 30 minutes and then strap on the infrared boot for 20 minutes on each foot. One of the supplements became a real take-your-medicine kind of daily drill. It was not tasty.

I like to get up and do stuff, not sit with my feet in a bucket or plugged into the wall for nearly an hour and a half in the morning and again at night.

Then again, this was my ticket back to doing what I like to do, period.

Most days, I dreaded it, especially as the year wore on. It became my time to check emails, do my daily Duolingo, and surf Facebook. I re-read Washington Irving’s “A Tour On The Prairies” and dove into George Bird Grinnell’s “When The Buffalo Ran,” which I’d been meaning to read for years.

Sin embargo, no es muy divertido, mis amigos. (However, not much fun, my friends)

For the first three months, I also went to Neurogen once a week for ShockWave therapy. I also spent 10 minutes with my feet on a vibrating plate, 10 minutes standing on a vibrating platform, and 10 minutes in a traction chair. The fellow patients and staff at Neorgen made those mornings fun, though.

Full disclosure: I traded my services in documenting my experiences for your entertainment for a healthy discount on these treatments. Gotta pay the bills, folks. I told Dr. William Lewis that if it worked, I’d go rattlesnake hunting the same time next year and do a story and video in his honor. Maybe, I said, we could even convince him to come along.

That invitation got an immediate “no thanks” from Dr. Lewis.

Who could say “no” to a mug like this? Rattlesnakes are pit vipers that essentially “see” body heat through the facial organs even in the dark, feel vibrations in the ground with their entire body, smell using their tongues, and track movements in bright daylight thanks to enhanced visual acuity with their vertical-slit pupils. Photo by Kelly Bostian/KJBOutdoors

What I learned

Boiled down to a very simple outdoor guy-can-understand-it level, my neuropathy stemmed from a sneaky auto-immune disorder that, as one doctor put it, makes my immune system “jumpy.”

Irritation in my feet was triggered, possibly from just plain abuse and/or poor-fitting boots or constantly wearing knee boots when hiking boots would have been better. And the RA (rheumatoid arthritis) took it from there. It over-reacted with chronic swelling that reduced blood flow, which eventually caused nerves to die (those early “asleep” feelings, plus occasionally needle-like jabs). The more nerves that died back, the fewer nerves were there to tell my brain to send blood to those areas, and so the vicious cycle continued. Reduced blood flow meant more dead nerves, and more dead nerves meant further reduced blood flow, and on it went.

The balls of the feet felt numb, then a few toes, then the front halves of each foot, the heels. It happened over the course of several years.

But after three weeks of treatments and being off salt, refined sugar, caffeine, and the fatty foods I like so much, the color started returning to my feet, and the gel used for the ShockWave treatments tickled and felt cold. Before that day, I had no sensations in my feet during those treatments.

The big takeaway was learning that neuropathy can be reversed depending on your underlying condition(s), especially if you catch it before it’s gone too far. Fellow patients shared some fantastic stories about the results of losing feelings in their extremities. Long-term issues resulting from accidents, cancer, diabetes, or a host of other issues bring people to neuropathy treatments.

When I walked into Neurogen Medical this time last year, I learned that I could not balance barefoot on one foot. In my feet, I felt nothing from electrodes that made my entire arm jump when the shock was applied to my hands. Testing showed that blood flow to my feet was low and that I’d lost a little over 50 percent of the feeling in my right foot and not quite 50 percent in the left.

I received my final tests last week, and both feet have recovered to 95 percent or better. In the final test, I felt the pinpricks, the cold test, and the light touch of a nylon brush. I balanced on each foot without issue.

But more importantly, now I can feel the rocks, I can feel the shift of my foot inside my boot and pick up on the sensation of that boot sliding or being off-kilter as it bears weight.

Clinical tests and scores are great, but what I needed was to walk that ridge and see how it felt, like getting a feel for an old tractor you haven’t driven for a few years. Along the ridge, through the soles of my boots, I felt the slip of mossy rocks, the slight roll of stones, whether my boot would hold on an angled rock, and where the rocks ended, and drops began.

I did not slip, I did not trip, I did not fall. And when Fitzer yelled, “Bostian, I see one! Get up here!” I ran up a rocky slope, caught my breath, and picked up a beautiful 5-foot-long diamondback.

Mission accomplished.

I am thankful I took the chance on Neurogen and Dr. Lewis and extremely thankful for my extraordinarily patient wife, DeAnna, who encouraged me all along the way, put up with my grumbling, and even dieted right along with me.

The woman is a saint to have stayed married to me for what will be 39 years on April 15.

Maybe we’ll get barefoot and have a dance.