A 64-year-old woman was attacked by a large python while doing the dishes at her house in Samut Prakan, Thailand, and survived for about two hours with the reptile trying to suffocate her to death.

Arrom Arunroj had just come home from her job as a maid at a children’s hospital in Bangkok and was doing the dishes at the back of the house when she felt a sharp pain on her right thigh. At first, she thought she had been bitten by one of the many insects that call the reed forest behind her house home, but when she looked down she saw a huge snake climbing up her leg. She instinctively grabbed the snake’s head and tried to pull it off of her, but it was too strong. The python eventually brought the woman down, coiled around her midsection, and started squeezing the life out of her.

Photo: David Clode/Unsplash

“While I was washing the dishes, I was also scooping water. As soon as I sat down, the snake bit me,” the 64-year-old woman said. “At first, I thought it was a cockroach, but then I saw it was a snake, and it started constricting me tightly. I fought with it for quite a while, since around half past eight.”

With the snake’s coils tightening around her body, Arrom could hardly breathe, let alone scream for help, but she did manage to call out with a faint voice and was lucky enough to be heard by one of her neighbors who called the police. Rescuers rushed to the woman’s house and broke the locked door to find her on the floor, exhausted, with her face pale from the cutoff circulation.

 

It reportedly took rescuers about 30 minutes to loosen the python’s grip around the woman’s body after which she was rushed to the nearest hospital. She is expected to make a full recovery, but she will never forget this close encounter.