A 64-year-old woman was preparing to do her evening dishes at her home outside Bangkok when she felt a sharp pain in her thigh and looked down to see a huge python taking hold of her.

“I was about to scoop some water and when I sat down it bit me immediately,” Arom Arunroj told Thailand’s Thairath newspaper. “When I looked I saw the snake wrapping around me.”

The four-to-five-meter-long (13-to-16-foot-long) python coiled itself around her torso, squeezing her down to the floor of her kitchen.

“I grabbed it by the head, but it wouldn’t release me,” she said. “It only tightened.”

Propped up against her kitchen door, she cried for help but it wasn’t until a neighbor happened to be walking by about an hour and a half later and heard her screams that authorities were called.

Police and animal control officers used a crowbar to hit the snake on the head until it released its grip and slithered away before it could be captured.

In all, Arom spent about two hours on Tuesday night in the clutches of the python before being freed.

Smaller pythons feed on small mammals such as rats, but larger snakes switch to prey such as pigs, deer and even domestic dogs and cats. Attacks on humans are not common, though do happen occasionally.