It was a snake selfie gone wrong: Ashley Glawe’s pet ball python, Bart, slithered through her earlobe during a photo session last week and got lodged in her gauged piercing (a stretched-out piercing through an earlobe).
“I kind of went into shock,” she said in an interview with NBC affiliate KGW. “As soon as I knew that he was through my ear, my adrenaline kicked in and I started shaking.”
After failing to pull the snake out herself, worried that she would hurt him by pulling against his scales, she called emergency services. But the firefighters who arrived weren’t able to remove Bart, so she went to the emergency room at a local hospital.
Staff at the hospital got to work and were able to stretch out Glawe’s earlobe to release Bart.
Glawe suffered minor bruising on her ear, but Bart was just fine.
“He acted like nothing even happened,” she told CNN. “He was totally chill.”
Glawe’s photos documenting the slippery ordeal went viral on Facebook with over 33,000 shares. They even made international headlines.
“Now looking back, I can laugh at it,” she said. “But it definitely was not a joke, or funny, or cute, or ‘cool,’ as some people want to call it, in the moment.”
“It’s kind of unbelievable to me!”
WATCH: A man was bitten by a python while trying to take a selfie with the serpent.