Page 14 - IAV Digital Magazine #578

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Woman Details Being Impaled By 4-foot Stingray In Shallow Water: 'Super Sharp'
By A. Pawlowski
A Florida woman is recovering after a stingray impaled her back and came within an inch of her lung with one of its barbs.
Kristie Cataffo- O’Brien had to undergo surgery to remove the stinger, spent a week in the hos- pital and still finds it incredibly painful to move her right arm.
The nurse says
she had just waded into shal- low water in Tampa Bay in Ruskin, Florida, on Aug. 22, sat on her knees and tilted her head back to get her hair wet when she immediately felt something sting her and experienced intense pain.
“It was super sharp,” Cataffo- O’Brien, 38, who lives in Apollo Beach, Florida, tells TODAY.com. “I thought that I
had gotten stung by jelly fish. ... When I stood up, that’s when (my husband) saw that the stingray was on me. It was on my back.”
Stingrays are shy and gentle, but they have long, thin tails equipped with up to three barbed, venomous spinal blades, which they use in self- defense when they feel threat- ened — often when they’re unintentionally
stepped on, according to the National Capital Poison Center.
Besides punctur- ing flesh, the stinger also releases a "com- plex venom," which causes intense pain, the center adds. Complications include infection and serious bleeding.
Steve Irwin, the TV personality known as the “Crocodile
Hunter,” died in 2006 when a stingray he was swimming with pierced his heart with its poison- ous spine.
Death from a stingray barb is extremely rare, but it can happen if the puncture wound is in the chest, stomach or neck, the National Capital Poison Center notes.
Cataffo-O’Brien doesn’t think she stepped on the creature, but she believes it was resting behind her and got star- tled. In Florida, beach goers who go in the water are advised to do the “stingray shuffle” — or slide their feet along the bottom — so that stingrays, which often bury them- selves in the sand, will feel the vibrations and move away.
Cataffo-O’Brien,
who has lived in Florida since she was 4, says she’s never encoun- tered a stingray before and typi- cally only did the shuffle in gulf waters, not the bay.
The stingray that pierced her back was about 4 feet across, and still alive and attached to her until first respon- ders arrived and cut it off. She says she got through the ordeal by going into “a meditative state.”
“I do yoga and I meditate pretty much every day and you just take your mind to a safe spot,” Cataffo-O’Brien says. “My hus- band luckily just kept me super, super still and was talking to me and kept me calm the whole time.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4uWZHYFUX4
iAV - Antelope Valley Digital Magazine