Book details recovery from snake bite

Former Fergus student spent 3 months in wheelchair

By Matt Bewley | The Daily Journal

Published Friday, March 30, 2007

When former Fergus Falls resident Erec Toso suffered a severe rattlesnake bite outside his Tucson, Ariz., home, he did not expect the profound spiritual awakening that would accompany his sometimes torturous recovery. His new book, “Zero at the Bone,” details how he was forced to tame his fears of cellular damage, hallucinations and near death experiences, and look at his life in a new way.

“It was a signifcant moment,” the University of Arizona English professor said. “I felt like I wasn’t going to make it.”

He was categorized by his doctors as having the most dangerous level of snakebite, due to the amount of venom introdcued into his bloodstream. He was taken twice to the hospital and spent three months in a wheelchair.

“When I was confined I thought, ‘What if I hadn’t made it,’” he said. “It bacame a pupose. I’m a writing teacher. We write in order to find out what we’re thinking, and to understand, to take meaning. Why was I bitten? There is no real answer to that.”

His gift was learning to think on a new level.

“You take a trauma and say, “How can I use this to be more alive?’ It was in relating with my family and nature. I found I felt really alive after this event. I wanted to rewrite my life story. I felt more alive, more accepting and less burdened by things I can’t control.”

“Zero to the Bone” spares no detail in his accounts of agonizing hospital procedures, in his revelations about rattlesnake lore, or in his descriptions of the wide-ranging effects of snake venom.

“In the months that follow his terrifying attack,” said a University of Arizona descritoion of the book, “priorities, daily habits, family relations, and definitions of self all come into question. What is predictable becomes problematic; what is comfortable becomes disconcerting. In a story that hinges on a common fear about an unlikely event—that of a snakebite—Toso uncovers a more widespread reality that many of us do not fear enough—complacency.”

Reviews have been strong and the book is now available through the University of Arizone Press, Barnes and Noble and on Amazon.com.

“Toso writes with simplicity and clarity about his near-fatal, life-shattering encounter with a rattlesnake,” the Library Journal said. “Toso used his pain and trauma to rethink his relationship to the animal world and to death itself. Toso's deeply personal work does not seek or accept easy answers; it deserves broad readership and critical acclaim.”