14 DAY TRIAL // A Spanish woman ended up in hospital after she was bitten on the backside by a poisonous snake as she sat on the lavatory in her bathroom.
Iris Castroverde, a 30-year-old hairdresser from the northern Spanish town of Narón, was bitten last Sunday, when a brightly-colored snake slid out her toilet. Apparently, the poisonous reptile was living in the plumbing system of her block of flats, and the mother-of-two said she heard a strange noise coming from the pipes in the wall as she sat down on the loo.
“I could hear something behind the wall and I was trying to work out what it might be as I hadn't heard it before,” Mrs. Iris recalls, according to the Croatian Times. “After that everything happened really quickly, I became aware that there was something moving in the toilet bowl, then I heard a splash and then an intense pain on my backside.”
When she stood up, the woman was shocked to see a bright yellow and green snake disappear down the drain. She says it was about 20 centimeters (eight inches) long and vanished with the flush.
The terrified woman grabbed two bottles of bleach and put them down the toilet, and as she was doing it she realized the snake was probably poisonous because her backside started to go numb. Iris immediately rushed to the hospital, where doctors treated her with antivenom for the bite.
“I dread to think what could have happened if it was one of my children on the toilet,” she said.
Mrs. Castroverde told reporters she still can't sit down and is feeling ill from the snake bite, but had to return to work after 24 hours.
The local environment health department closed all of the bathrooms in the building where the hairdresser lives and isolated the plumbing system to search the pipes. However, their search was fruitless and the serpent remained at large.
Residents were allowed back in the building, including kids from a kindergarten on the ground floor. However, Iris's neighbors are continually throwing bleach down their drains in an attempt to keep the snake away.
“I have been pouring litres of bleach down the toilets in the hope that will keep it away,” said one terrified neighbor, who confessed she had been using a potty since the incident.
Police believe the snake might have escaped or been flushed away by an exotic pet owner in the area.