Animal-loving Connecticut dad is nearly killed trying to rescue VERY dangerous animal he spotted lying in the middle of the road

An animal lover nearly lost his life when he tried to save an animal that turned out to be very dangerous and was found in the middle of a busy road.

Joey Ricciardella of Connecticut was driving home to Torrington on Sunday after dropping off his 4-year-old daughter at her mother’s home in New York when he came across a snake in the middle of the road.

Ricciardella, who has a soft spot for animals, stopped his vehicle and grabbed a shirt from the backseat, placed it over the snake’s head and picked it up to move it. WFSB reports.

But the animal in danger was a poisonous rattlesnake. When Ricciardella tried to grab it, the deadly reptile bit him on the hand.

“It sounded like he was trying to make a funny voice, and I thought he was joking at first,” Brittany Hilmeyer, the mother of his 4-year-old son, said of her conversation with him afterward.

She explained that she was used to Ricciardella being a jokester, but she soon realized something was seriously wrong.

“He got to the point where he really couldn’t talk anymore. You couldn’t understand him,” she said.

“It was like trying to talk to someone with a mouth full of marbles.”

Hilmeyer didn’t know it at the time, but the venom from the snakebite was affecting his breathing.

She said she wasn’t surprised when she later discovered that Ricciardella had done his best to help the snake.

“He once had a bat in his house with a broken wing that he wanted to have fixed,” she said.

‘Last week it was a baby bunny.’

The poisonous snake bit his hand, causing him difficulty breathing

Ricciardella tried to wrap the snake’s head in a shirt from his car and tried to get it out of the way of the busy street

Ricciardella somehow managed to get back to his car and drove himself to the nearest hospital, where doctors determined that his respiratory system was not functioning properly and that he was in cardiac arrest.

But because there was a shortage of antidote at Charlotte Hungerford Hospital in Torrington, he had to be transferred to Hartford Hospital in the state capital.

“I think it’s not common practice in many hospitals to carry large quantities of antivenom,” Hilmeyer said.

“So that was part of the problem when he went to the first hospital. The second hospital had more flown-in patients.”

Ricciardella is an animal lover who once tried to help a bat with a broken wing

There are only two venomous snakes in Connecticut: the northern copperhead and the timber rattlesnake. Their bites can be fatal.

The Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection advises anyone who encounters one of these species to observe it from a distance and back away slowly.

But Ricciardella was lucky and would make it to the hospital, after suffering not only from the poison but also from a life-threatening allergic reaction that left him in a medically induced coma, according to an online fundraiser to pay his medical bills.

“There has been some improvement, but the medical bills are piling up and he has no insurance because he is a self-employed gardener,” the fundraiser said, adding that he has four children, three of whom are under 16.

Ricciardella is expected to spend at least another week recovering in intensive care.

“They’re waiting for the swelling to go down,” Hilmeyer said. “Then he won’t have to be under so much anesthesia.”

“Then he can talk.”