A Lakeland man is recovering from a rattlesnake bite from two weeks ago, but at this point in his life he’s kind of used to the pain.
ABC Action News hasn’t seen his medical records but Kyle Cook tells us he has been bitten by a rattlesnake, alligator, a brown recluse spider, and four years ago was even struck by lightning.
“I feel blessed, I really do because every one of them could have killed me,” he said.
The snake bite, the most recent brush with death, happened when Cook was mowing the grass in his backyard.
He said he heard the snake rattling and took out his phone to snap a picture when he stepped on a stick, scaring the snake causing it to lunge and bite down on his ankle.
“I didn’t feel anything at first, and then I screamed for my wife,” he said.
Kyle and his wife, Sara, went to emergency room where they ran into the same doctor who treated him after getting struck by lightning.
“His first words where ‘my God what is wrong with your luck’,” he said.
The spider bite on his hand happened this past April when he was moving crates. He said his hand swelled up to the size of a catchers mitt.
“It was so big that I probably could have caught a ball,” he told ABC Action News.
As for the gator bite, Cook said that encounter happened after he tried freeing a small gator from a fishing line.
“That was his way of thanking me,” he said.
He described the bolt of lightning that shocked him as the most terrifying, and nearly life-ending.
His doctor may have summed it up best.
“He looked at me and said, you’re never allowed near me,” he said.
