EnviroLink Forum

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I know God will not give me anything I can't handle. I just wish he didn't trust me so much. - Mother Theresa

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"Yes like I said it all boils down to morals. What you think is right doesn't make a person wrong because they think different " X-Black

I believe Steve Irwin pulled out that barb due to the extreme pain.

...."Like virtually every beachgoer unlucky enough to step on a stingray, Bill Johnston suffered intense pain after a ray's barb jabbed him in the ankle at Honeymoon Island last month.....
One morning, almost four weeks after he was stung, blood suddenly gushed from the puncture wound on his left ankle because of complications from his sting. Emergency surgery stopped Johnston's bleeding, but he bled extensively. "I was more kind of shocked and surprised that this was happening and that there was so much (blood) so quickly," said Johnston, 61, a retired commercial property manager who lives in Palm Harbor. "I knew that if I lost enough blood I could go into shock. I knew I had to do something quick."

Doctors are not sure what caused Johnston's hemorrhage. At first, Dr. David Berry, the Mease Countryside Hospital surgeon who performed the emergency surgery to stop the bleeding, suspected that the stingray's toxin lingered in Johnston's foot or the sting caused an infection that "ate away at the tissue until it ate through the artery."

Johnston's unusual stingray experience began Aug. 1 when he was walking on rocks in waist-deep water at Honeymoon Island. He knew immediately what had happened, especially since he had been stung by a stingray two weeks before. "I've never been stung before but then I get stung twice in two weeks," Johnston said. "Within seconds, I felt the pain come on. It was excruciating. It doubles you up."

http://www.sptimes.com/News/091800/news ... in__.shtml


Another..

"Hi there,

I was very interested in your article about sting ray stings, as I had the misfortune 2 years ago to be "hit by one of these fellows in the right foot. The stinger went through rubber boots (waders) and when I pulled the waders off, the stinger had pulled my thick white sock through the hole in the waders. The injury has taken 12 months to heal and really to this day I can still feel a sting when I talk about it!

The injury was so severe. The pain was unbelievable! It really was! Thank god it was me and not one of my children, I just would have not known how painful it was.

I am a butcher by trade and have been cut/stabbed/sliced and have been stitched by every doctor in Melbourne, so I am quite brave when it come to the pain threshold, but this was something I have never or want to encounter again .

The hot water worked really good, but you have to be careful, the pain takes over all the other senses, I couldn't even feel the doctors injections and he gave me heaps of "peth". 30 minutes later I stopped yelling *phew*.

But the second worse thing happened for a best part of the week was I was fainting about 10 times a day. The hospital put it down to Marine toxins in my system. The covering of the Stinger is like a slimy velvet (black) and is also pushed into the wound causing mass infection. This MUST be removed ( painfully) I might add.

I just thought that I would share my first hand experience with you. Keep up the good work!

Regards Colin Palmer."

Lost that link.

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I can have oodles of charm....... when I want to.

Here it is from link above:

But Carl Luer, a senior scientist at Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, said it is highly unlikely that the stingray's toxin ruptured Johnston's artery 27 days after he was stung. The toxin, he said, is a protein that breaks down by itself in 24 to 48 hours.

"I'm 99 percent sure it is not the toxin," Luer said. "Nothing we know about the toxin would lead me to believe that it would stay in the system for that long."

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I can have oodles of charm....... when I want to.

But again SD, to support my claim about necrosis (and the 12 year old who died 6 days after the sting) from your link above:

"Very little has been written about the toxin left in wounds after a stingray injury. It is known that the stingray toxin is a protein and is very sensitive to heat. The patient should obtain very rapid symptomatic improvement with heat as the poison denatures and becomes neutralized. Some thought exists that the protein does not truly denature but that some sort of gateway effect occurs on the nerve conduction. Whatever the truth is regarding how heat works, it is a rapid, effective treatment to reduce pain almost instantaneously."

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I can have oodles of charm....... when I want to.

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"Yes like I said it all boils down to morals. What you think is right doesn't make a person wrong because they think different " X-Black

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We do what we must because we can,for the good of all of us....except the ones that are dead.