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Great news!  Chase did make it through the night and did not need the second antivenom injection.  His platelets started to come down and he wagged his tail at somebody there.  My friend called every 3 hours through the night and was just sick with worry, but he appears to have weathered the worst of it with sedation and pain meds.  His neck is still swollen (orange size mass) and they are hoping it resolves without so much destruction of tissue, but they have been warned- it could get ugly and take months to treat the actual bite on the neck.  For now, he's ok, very sedated but stable.  This didn't happen in a field or woods, it was right on the sidewalk of our neighborhood, houses everywhere and kids playing in the park just feet from where Chase got bit.  Another neighbor said they found a baby rattlesnake curled up in a flower pot in their backyard.  Oh Geez!!!  Looks like a bad year for snakes.

Davis, it's not to nice to think about going out with dogs and having to be on snake patrol.  My niece in Arizona carries a shovel everywhere she goes outside at her ranch.  She's has 4 Great Danes and 5 horses and 2 of the dogs and one of the horses was bit.  She had to make her first kill recently when one of the dogs found one curled up at the side of the house and her vet husband was away at work.  Her big "ferocious" dogs like to play with them.  Small dogs get it in the face ususally, the Danes get bit in the legs.  I nearly had a stroke when my daughter and her fiance called me from Joshua Tree National Monument earlier this week to tell me they were camping and hiking there.  All I could imagine was a snake bite and looooooong wait for the Yucca Tree rescue crews to arrive.  Mark is an enthusiast of remote exeriences, and though he's very experienced, you just can't win when you come up and surprise a rattlesnake by accident.