"Honey, stay still!" This was the startling wake-up call for Rachel Bloor, an Australian resident, when she opened her eyes in the middle of the night only to discover a hefty python coiled on her chest.
On that fateful Monday night, Rachel felt an unusual weight resting upon her as she stirred in bed. In her sleepy state, she instinctively reached out for her dog, only to find herself stroking a slick and serpentine creature instead.
As she pulled the covers higher up to her neck in a bid to shield herself, her partner flipped on the bedside lamp, confirming their fears with a startled statement. "He said, 'Oh baby. Don't move. There's like a 2.5-meter python on you,'" Rachel recounted during an interview with the BBC.
Her initial reaction was to let loose a string of expletives, followed closely by an urgent command to get their dogs out of the room. "I thought if my Dalmatian realizes there’s a snake there... it’s going to be chaos," she explained.
Once the dogs were safely outside and her husband wishing he could join them, Rachel set about the delicate task of freeing herself from the python’s grasp. "I was just trying to shimmy out from under the covers, thinking to myself, ‘Is this really happening? This is so bizarre,’" she recalled.
Rachel surmised that the carpet python, which is known to be non-venomous, had likely slithered through the window shutters and made its way onto her bed. After managing to disentangle herself from the creature, she decided to help it back to its point of entry.
"It was so large that even though it had been curled up on me, part of its tail was still hanging out of the shutter," she stated. When she gently grasped the python, she noticed it didn’t appear overly agitated; it merely wobbled gently in her hand.
In stark contrast, her husband was visibly shocked, yet Rachel herself remained surprisingly unfazed—growing up in a rural setting surrounded by snakes had prepared her for such encounters. "I believe if you stay calm, they will too," she expressed.
However, she added a humorous twist, stating that had it been a cane toad, which is considered one of Australia’s most troublesome and unattractive pests, her experience would have been quite different. "I can't stand them; they make me feel nauseous. So if it was a cane toad, I would have been terrified," she laughed.
Fortunately, both the humans and animals involved emerged from this unexpected encounter completely unharmed. Carpet pythons are constrictors commonly found along Australia’s coastal regions, primarily preying on smaller mammals like birds.
