Episode_1

Chloe Vasquez shares her personal experience of her mother being bitten by a snake in Costa Rica. She recounts the initial disbelief and the seriousness of the situation as her mother was rushed to the hospital and underwent treatment, including surgeries and taking antibiotics. Chloe describes her own involvement in the situation, balancing her college classes and assisting her mother during the month-long hospital stay. She highlights the lack of awareness and attention given to snake bites as a public health issue, with alarming statistics of deaths and disabilities caused by snake venom. Chloe delves into the challenges faced by snake bite victims in accessing proper medical care, including a crisis in anti-venom availability in rural areas. She expresses her fascination with the complexity of this neglected health problem and the injustice that stems from indifference towards those without economic power or political voice. Chloe aims to raise awareness and start conversations abo Hi, my name is Chloe Vasquez, and I'm here to tell you about snake bites. And you might be thinking, why snake bites? Well, let me tell you. For me, this all began in 2020, when my mom was bitten by a pit viper in Costa Rica. I'll have my mom tell her own story in a later episode, but for now, I'll tell you how I experienced it. It was 2020, in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, and I was at Macalester College. I was sitting upstairs in a building called the Janet Wallace Center, when I got a call from my mom. She said, I've been bitten by a snake. And I laughed at her, because it just all seemed so crazy and unlikely. And when she told me that she was in the hospital, my first thought was that maybe she was being a little dramatic. But as she kept talking, I realized that maybe this was a little bit more serious than I had first anticipated. She had been in her hotel the night before, walking up the stairs in some sandals. She was going up with her friend to go meet their tour guide to catch some drinks while they were on vacation. And the stairs were very dimly lit, and my mom stepped on something and felt a sting in her ankle. She turned around and she saw the snake, and its head had lifted up, and it was just staring at her. And she said to her friend, a snake just bit me. And her friend immediately ran up the stairs past the snake to go find the tour guide. And meanwhile, my mom was just staring at the snake that had just bit her leg. And she was freaking out inside, but just stayed staring. When the tour guide came back, he saw the snake and said, we need to go immediately to the hospital. My mom passed out before she even reached the car. And when they got her in the car, she woke up, and they kept her awake for the whole ride to the clinic. It was about 20 minutes. They were flying on this mountain road. The tour guide called ahead to the hospital to make sure that they had the antivenom ready. And as soon as she got there, she got injected with the antivenom. And at the clinic, they sliced her leg open from her toe to right under her knee. And I later learned that this is a procedure called a fasciotomy. And from there, she was helicoptered to the capital, San Jose. So the morning I'm getting this call is the morning after all of this crazy action taking place. And she doesn't tell me any of this until later. She just tells me, maybe you should think about getting a flight down here. And so that day, I booked a flight for the following day. I packed up all of my things. I left them in emergency storage. And I flew down to Costa Rica to be with my mom. And we ended up staying about a month in the hospital. By complete coincidence, my first year roommate and one of my closest friends was from Costa Rica. So I went, and I stayed with her family. And they so kindly drove me to the hospital every morning. They took me home every evening. During the first two weeks, my mom was going in for surgeries every day or two days to do what they call debridement. So they were taking out all of this dead necrotic tissue that the venom had killed. And so as her leg tissue kept dying, they had to keep taking the tissue out so that it didn't get infected. She was on all sorts of antibiotics. She was on a lot of morphine and painkillers. And my mom, being the crazy hard worker that she is, was trying to work through all of this. And she was getting frustrated that she couldn't keep doing her legal research. Yeah, I remember there were scares with infections. She had to get a blood transfusion at some point, and that really scared her. And at one point, her catheter came out of her back. So the tube that was sending all of this medicine to her back had just slipped out. And we didn't realize. And my poor mom was just telling all of these nurses she was in pain, she was in pain, she was in pain. And they kept telling her that they cannot give her any more medicine. And she kept asking, kept asking. And finally, someone just leaned her forward and saw that all of the medicine that they had been trying to give her was just dribbling into the back of her hospital chair. And so that was a disaster. But finally, we got the catheter back in. And I told them that I was taking a public health class, and I don't know if something was lost in translation, or if they just wanted to give me some random medical experience. But they let me help put my mom's catheter in. Like I was shoving this long metal stick into my mother's back hard. And yeah, so it was a crazy experience. And during all of this, I was completing my Macalester online classes because it was COVID. So... I was taking two courses because we were in the quarter system. And I was acting as an assistant teacher for a calculus class. And so I was just calling into my Zoom classes with my mom in the background, getting like a skin graft. And so it was just such a crazy experience. But after one month, we went back to Texas. We came home, and my mom kept getting treated within the house, and we had doctors and nurses come visit. Interestingly, they sent my mom with this medicine necklace. And so I think this was supposed to be a replacement for her catheter, which was connected to whatever those drippy things are called that, you know, drip the medicine into you. So she had this little necklace. It was connected to her catheter. And in there, they had fentanyl because the morphine was wearing off. And I think that they had her alternating. So they sent us home with some fentanyl, and we were just diluting that in our house. And at some point, a doctor came to visit, and he saw the fentanyl. And he was like, first of all, this is incredibly illegal. Second of all, you could kill her if you mess this up. So luckily, nobody went to jail, and we got that taken care of. But that was just like a crazy international health experience. And to this day, my mom is alive and well. She lost her tendons from the experience, the tendons in her ankle. So if she wanted to flex her foot and make it, like, have a right angle, she couldn't do that because her tendons are missing there. But all in all, she has her leg, which is more than most people can say after an encounter with a fer-de-lance or a Bothrop's Asper, which is the snake that bit my mom. And she has a super gnarly scar. Once we were back stateside, I continued with school. And at one point, I did a project on snake bites because I just wanted to learn more about them after my mom's experience. And I looked at the numbers, and I saw that up to 138,000 people per year die of snake bite and venoming, which is the term for the sickness that happens after you get injected with snake venom. And another 400,000 are left with permanent disability or some sort of permanent effects of the snake venom. And I was really shocked. This is more than dengue and rabies combined. So at first, I realized this is a huge issue. And second, why is nobody talking about this? I hear about dengue and rabies, and we're very aware of these public health issues. But snake bites is more of just some sort of exotic, scary thing that happens to wilderness explorers, but it's like a rare one-off event, right? And seeing these numbers, that's just wrong. And so my big question was, why is this so invisible to the public sphere of our dialogue surrounding public health? And I just wanted to know more. And so I just kept digging through that project. I learned about a crisis in anti-venom access, where most snake bite victims are rural farmers in tropical and subtropical countries, or people that just work with the land are in higher contact, and they're at higher risk for getting bit by a venomous snake. And in a lot of these areas, the health centers are very few and far in between. And the health centers that are there don't often have anti-venom in stock. And in many cases, the doctors are not trained to handle snake bites. And there's always these stock outs. So maybe the clinic is supposed to have anti-venom, or the hospital is supposed to have anti-venom, but they don't. And the victims don't tend to have a way to get to the clinics. They often don't have personal transportation. So that's just a whole other obstacle. When I was reading all of this, I just was morbidly obsessed with the complexities of this health problem. I am a political science major. So a lot of the times when I'm learning about these global conflicts, it's not really black and white. There's like two sides to every story, and there's no bad guy, and there's no clear-cut solution. But with snake bites, it was so interesting to me because the anti-venom exists. It works. We have empirical evidence that shows that the anti-venom will save your life. If you get the correct, a well-produced anti-venom, it will save you. And not only that, but it's cost-effective. We're able to produce it, but yet it's not getting produced, and it's not getting to the regions that it needs to get to. And it's just neglect that leads to this situation. And it's a really compelling injustice that I think not enough people recognize and not enough people talk about, that it's really such a simple problem that there's really not funds. And so there's a lot of complexities in the issue of snake bite and how the anti-venom reaches people, but at the end of the day, a lot of this stems from an indifference towards the health of people who do not have political voice or economic purchasing power. And so I think that because of my mom's experience and my position as somebody who has access to a lot of incredible resources, I want to start those conversations. I want to talk about what we can do to learn more about this neglected public health issue. I want to dig into what's happening, what's going wrong in the story of snake bite that makes the system not work. I've spent the last two years learning about snake bites, and this started in the summer of 2023. I went back to Costa Rica, and I met the people who developed the anti-venom that saved my mom's life. And I talked not just about the medicine that they produce, how it's made, but I also explored Costa Rica's public health systems that created the perfect circumstances that allow my mom and other snake bite victims in Costa Rica to reach the medicine, to receive adequate care. In Costa Rica, I met the people that really inspired this project, that they inspire my career, they inspire everything that I want to be, they work towards global well-being. And so, fun fact, in Costa Rica, they produce anti-venom for the African continent. And I remember asking them why they were doing this, how big is the market, are they making any revenue? And they were kind of like, we produce anti-venom because we care about human well-being and human rights, and there's not enough anti-venom in Africa right now. And I was just flabbergasted, and I looked at them and I said, but are you making money? The Costa Rican government is subsidizing this production, how can this be possible? This was so hard for my United States mind to comprehend, that it's not all profit-driven, like how are you not trying to maximize profit right now? It's because they care about human well-being. So over that summer in Costa Rica, I filmed and edited and produced my first and only documentary, it's called The Story of Snake Bite, I encourage you to look it up. And I left with a lot of new knowledge and a lot of new inspiration to continue learning about this huge issue. And the following summer, I went to Oaxaca, Mexico, and I spoke to snake bite victims about their experiences. And this was also a very transformative experience, where I saw the other side, you know, I spoke to victims other than my mom, who told me their stories of when they went to the clinic, when they didn't go to the clinic, why, why didn't they make it? Why wasn't it worth it to them? Were they not able to go? And so I'm going to talk a lot deeper about that in a later episode. But all of this has created this almost obsession, everybody who knows me knows that I am the snake bite lady.