Recovery has been exasperatingly slow, but steady.  That little guy (I did manage to catch him and release him when his fangs got caught on the dishtowel I used to protect my hand after he bit me the first time) packed quite a punch.  He turned the whole underside of my right arm from my armpit to about 3 inches shy of my wrist a solid dark purple.  (I took a picture or two on my digital camera and will post them (over the fold, they're not for the squeamish) when I can track down the adaptor.)

Anyway, finally there was some pretty substantial improvement today.  The bruising is fading/blotching and the swelling has finally all-but-disappeared everywhere but the bite-finger itself.

What did I learn?  Baby rattlesnake venom is more toxic than the adult venom.  And babies haven't yet learned to control how much venom they deliver so you're likely to get almost all of it.  Even a 2 or 2.5 ' snake that's 1/2 or 3/4" thick (the distance between fangs was 1.2 cm or just under 1/2") can ruin your whole day.

The advice I got from poison control was awful.  A 'dry bite' doesn't require medical attention necessarily, but a 'dry bite' won't swell up your whole hand.  Yes, I was predisposed to weather the storm, but that would have, at a minimum, cost me my finger and likely my arm.  Once they heard 'baby rattlesnake' and 'entire hand swollen', they should have known what to recommend and how strongly to recommend it.  Maybe they get a bunch of hypochondriac callers or something, I dunno.

The health care system is disfunctional.  In a perfect world, I call the low-cost clinic run by a nurse practitioner, I select the 'hands on' option (that allows me, within reason, to direct my own treatment, with the advice, but not control, of medical professionals) and get 4 doses of anti-venom.  I pay the cost of treatment (maybe $200 + wholesale cost of prescription,) get treated, go home.

Instead, I get thrown into the model of waste, delay, inefficiency, bureaucracy, and misplaced incentives that is the modern American hospital.  If you're wondering why the U.S. spends so much on health care and gets so little for it, my experience might be instructive.