Article content

Shalabha Kalliath’s legs buckled as pain shot through her body during a walk on a beach in Thailand.

When she looked down, a small snake dangled from her right big toe. She was able to slam it against a wall in Ko Phi Phi before collapsing during a vacation late last month.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or ‘They were surprised I was still alive’: Snake bite during Thai vacation leaves Ontario woman near death, twice Back to video

“I swore at it and I fell immediately,” said the Ontario woman, who came close to death twice — once in Thailand and then again after a flare-up in Canada — after the bite from a Malayan pit viper.

“I felt horrible, I was nauseated and unable to move.”

Someone else killed the snake that day. Its identification, by a Thai medic, would later help save the 26-year-old.

After being bitten, the recent engineering graduate of the University of Waterloo said a friend and a stranger helped her to a nearby clinic on the idyllic Thai island where one doctor told her she could die.

“I’m thinking, ‘some context might be nice,”‘ she said, recalling that she felt her mental faculties failing and was unable to process the possibility of dying.