Not again! Another air-conditioner snake surprise!

A few years ago,my husband was very ill--had picked up a nasty virus which had flattened him, and he was in bed for about a week or so--he was becoming weaker, and losing weight as a result.  Well during this time, I had done what I could for him one morning before heading off to work, and knew I could check in on him during the day.

But in my absence, Chris had a visitor--not really a friendly one though!

About mid-morning, Chris woke up from a medicated slumber noticing that something didn't look right about our split system air-conditioner in the wall to the right of the bed.  Groggily he could remember hearing a plop sound as something appeared to drop from that area onto the carpet.  But groggily, he just drifted off to sleep again.

Sometime later he woke up again, thinking to himself..."I think that plop was a snake!  And from the sound of the plop--probably a large one!"  So he carefully got out of bed and started to weakly look around the room. 

We have a waterbed, which has 6 drawers built into the base of the bed, and as Chris knew he couldn't see the snake anywhere clearly visible in the room, the snake had most likely crawled under the bed, and was warming itself in or near one of those drawers.  So with our friendly 'snake spade' near by, he gingerly, as much as he could in his groggy, weakened state, began pulling the large drawers out from under the bed.  One by one, there appeared to be no signs of a snake--until he got to the 6th drawer--and there it was!  A King Brown snake--not feeling very friendly either!  (King brown snakes can be highly poisonous because of the amount of venom they can inject with each bite.)

A struggle ensued, and Chris eventually won the battle and managed to capture and kill the snake with the help of "spade".  But of course the tell-tale signs of the battle--the drawers all over the floor, the blood on the carpet, and the ever present fish smell as a result, all meant a big clean-up.

By the time I got home from work, the clean-up had been done, and an exhausted Chris lay in bed, just trying to build up his weakened condition again, as he told me of his adventure that day.  (Made my Committee meetings sound very boring!)

Eventually Chris' health improved, and we eventually discovered that the drain pipe from the air-conditioner's split system did not have a drain cap on the end of it. The simple insertion of this cap has prevented any further snakes from seeking the moisture and crawling inside of this drain tubing...if only we had realised that before these air-conditioner adventures!  Live (hopefully) and Learn, as they say!