PONCA CITY, OK—Highway engineer Dan Guischard, 29, has an irrational phobia of snakebites that only worsens with each successive snakebite, sources close to him said Monday. "He was pretty bad already before that rattler got him while he was surveying the Highway 44 on-ramp, and he became practically intolerable after he was bitten by a cottonmouth on that camping trip," said friend John Lancie, who recalled that Guischard once missed three weeks of high school because of a snakebite. "It's so bad now that, last week, when he was changing a flat and saw a snake, he totally lost it. Which is probably why the snake bit him." Guischard, packing for a two-week family vacation to the Arizona desert, was unavailable for comment.
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