Snakes, temperatures and a baby on the way
A LATE night close encounter with a red bellied black snake would be excitement enough for most people, but it wasn't even the beginning of the excitement for one Gympie couple this month, and it certainly wasn't the end.
Katrina Drury was almost 39 weeks pregnant with her third son on the evening of October 8, when she stepped through the sliding glass doors of her Canina home about 9.15pm to put a box of bananas on the table outside before going to bed.
The lights were all off and everyone tucked into bed. It had been a big day, with Katrina's husband Russell, a fencing contractor, giving himself a serious puncture wound at work and having to present himself to Gympie hospital for treatment.
As Katrina placed the box on the table she felt something "scrape" across the top of her right foot.
"It felt like getting scratched by lantana or flicked with a stick," she said this week.
Not surprisingly, and despite being heavily pregnant, Katrina leapt in the air and "screamed and hollered".
She went inside and told Russell, who said "it'll be nothing".
"I said 'there's something out there' so he went out with a torch."
The torch revealed, under the table, an almost metre-long red-bellied black snake.
Back inside, the light revealed two red marks on Katrina's foot. Snake bite.
Russell called 000 and the ambulance arrived 20 minutes later.
A compression bandage was wrapped around Katrina's foot and she was rushed to Gympie hospital - it was an uncomfortable trip as Katrina was asked to lay flat in case she had been injected with venom.
She was kept in hospital for observation and tests until 1am.
The startled snake had tried to bite her but hadn't managed to inject any venom.
At 1.30am Russell and Katrina arrived back home at Canina.
At 2am, Katrina got up to Cooper, 2, who had a temperature, and gave him some paracetamol.
At 4am her waters broke. Katrina's isn't sure if it was the fright or the ambulance trip that got things going.
Her contractions started coming 10 minutes apart.
Her labour with Cooper, took just 3½ hours, so she suspected she needed to get to Buderim, where she was booked into the private hospital, fast.
They arrived at the hospital at 5.30am and Dallas William Louis Drury was born 45 minutes later.
The labour had taken 2¼ hours. Dallas was nine days early and weighed a healthy 4040 grams.
But the fun wasn't quite over for the Drurys.
Three days later, with Katrina and Dallas still in Buderim, four-year-old Max was admitted to Gympie Hospital with suspected meningitis.
It was a harrowing time until Max was diagnosed with severe tonsillitis.
The next day (last Saturday) everyone was released from hospital and it was a very early night.
When Katrina went to throw the frying pan water outside, she made sure she turned the light on.
