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A lawn maintenance worker is recovering in the hospital one day after, officials said, he was bitten by a snake at an apartment complex in Miramar, Fla.

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7News cameras showed 34-year-old Alcides Maldonado in his hospital bed at Palmetto General Hospital. Doctors said the patient is lucky he received anti-venom treatment when he did because the snake that bit him, a water moccasin, was poisonous.

Maldonado was doing yard work at the Windsor at Miramar complex when he was bitten on his left hand by the reptile, Thursday afternoon.

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Maldonado said he initially was not sure what had happened. “I saw something moving, then felt the prick,” he said through a translator. “I thought it was a splinter until I saw the blood.”

When he saw the water moccasin, he took out the machete and killed it so he could know what type of snake bit him. “He picked his gardening tool back up and then attacked the snake and killed the snake in the process,” said said Dr. Alex Morizio at Palmetto General Hospital.

Maldonado then took photographs of the snake, so he could have evidence of the snake that bit him, just in case it was poisonous.

“I started to feel a sharp pain. Then it started to run up my arm and swell,” he said.

Within the hour, Maldonado said, he was unable to move his hand. “When I saw that I couldn’t move my fingers or hand, that’s when I got scared,” he said.

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