HUFFMAN, Texas — A cheerleading performance was anything but routine for a Texas teenager, who was bitten by a snake as she videotaped her session.
Paris Montgomery was in her backyard practicing her cheerleading routines and thought she stepped on a stick after dismounting from her trampoline, KTRK reported.
It wasn’t. It was a venomous copperhead, who bit the teen on her right foot.
“Something just started hurting,” Montgomery told the television station. “I didn’t know it was a snake.”
Montgomery, a high school junior, went to her mother when her foot began to swell.
"I was trying to just walk it off, and then I started limping to my mom. And started swelling up getting worse and then I couldn't even touch it, so it just got worse really quick," Montgomery told KRIV.
Tracy Montgomery said she thought her daughter had been stung by a bee.
"When she first came to me, she said, 'Mom, I think something was in my shoe, or I got poked by a stick,' and so I didn't really think it was that urgent until it started swelling," Tracy Montgomery told KRIV. "Then I thought maybe a bee stung on her, so I went and got some baking soda and put on it. And it kept getting worse, then wondered if maybe it was a poisonous spider, because I thought it was something in her shoe, because all she remembered was taking her shoe off and it hurting."
Tracy Montgomery decided to take her daughter to the hospital. The Montgomerys did not realize Paris had been bitten by a snake until they reached the emergency room.
"When we were trying to tell the doctor what happened, (Paris) said, 'I have it on video,' and that's when we zoomed it in and saw it was a snakebite." Tracy Montgomery told KRIV. "Even when she saw it, she said, 'There's no way a snake bit me and I didn't know it', and I'm like, 'It's on video.'"
Paris Montgomery was given four doses of anti-venom serum to stop the swelling, KTRK reported.
"The swelling went down a lot after two or three doses of it," Paris Montgomery told KRIV. Although she is leery to return to the backyard, the teen said her father cleaned out the area.
Paris Montgomery also said she will pay more attention the next time she begins another cheerleading routine, the television station reported.