Stung by a stingray

I’ve always been fascinated by the beautiful creature called manta ray. Its shape is one of the most marvelous I’ve ever seen. 

But recently I found out very painfully that he has an evil step brother who stings, and he stings so bad!

The pain was the biggest pain I had ever felt (and I gave birth 4 times without epidural).

But thank god I was blessed with 2 angels which saved me and took care of me after hours of suffering (and screaming 🤦‍♀️) and I don’t know how to thank them 🙏🏻❤️🙏🏻❤️

So, on last Sunday we got together in the beautiful and very close national park called “Bahya Ballena”, with friends we haven’t seen for a while. We were excited to meet with them and the water was amazing! Not too warm or too cold, just cool and the waves were high but not too much, like in a wave pool. 

We had a good time and by the afternoon we got hungry and started planning where we’re going to have lunch all together. 

My younger son came to me full of sand and asked me to clean him up and I don’t know why I said – ‘let’s go back to the sea to wash you up’ when there were showers next to the entrance, but I did.

We got back into the water, me and Daniel and my friend and my little girl joined us too. We were really a few steps away from the shore when suddenly I felt a stab in my ankle and when the thing that stabbed me got out it even hurt more.. I didn’t know what happened but I knew it was someone not something and I asked my friend to take the kids out of the water. I thought it was a crocodile…

I had a 2cm wide cut and I was bleeding but the pain was getting stronger and stronger and it didn’t come from the cut. Something was burning inside of my flesh and I told Roi it doesn’t make sense that it hurts so much because of a cut. Our friend which has a medical past from the army started to give pressure on the wound to stop the bleeding, but when the bleeding stopped I felt something is moving inside my leg. 

We had like a 800 meters of walking until the entrance and I didn’t know how I’ll do it so poor Roi just carried me like a potato sack (our friends son asked him if I’m not too heavy while he was carrying me 🤦‍♀️) when we reached one of the workers of the park, he took one look and said it’s a stingray bite. He said it’s not dangerous but it hurts and that I should take something for the pain. He asked the guard at the entrance to let us bring the car so we can exit as fast as possible. 

I thought I just wanted to go home and lay down only to realise when I got home that the pain became so intense and I couldn’t do anything except leaning against the wall screaming and asking for god’s help. That bad. It literally hurts more than giving birth!

We asked for our landlord’s guidance but she wasn’t around and Roi went to the pharmacy to buy something for the pain, but what they gave him made the burning even worse! I was hopeless and felt that I’m going to faint.

After 4 hours in total of suffering came my angel. She’s my landlord’s mother and she’s been healing people with medicinal plants. She treated me like a daughter.

With back problems, she sat on the floor and held my injured leg and put special ointments that she made and medicinal plants and with an iron she made the wound heat, and the hotter it was the less painful it became! Actually I didn’t feel the heat at all! I had an iron 1cm away from my leg and I didn’t feel anything! After a while the pain was still very big but I could lift my leg and finally and thankfully rest. 

After about an hour my second angel arrived, it was my landlord and her partner, they asked a veteran fisherman what to do and he recommended putting compresses with ashes of a tree. She treated me too like I was her daughter, mixed the ashes with boiling water and put it on my ankle several times until the pain was almost gone!! I felt so much better! After a while I even set down to eat with everybody. 

I felt so much better that I went walking in the next morning which was too much, they just saved me 🙏🏻 

I don’t know what would I’ve done without those dear souls who were there for me that day in my hardest time ❤️

I’m almost a week since it happened and I’m still bruised and swollen and in pain but I’m optimistic and doing a lot of healing meditations for a fast recovery 🙌

Here are some tips if it happens to you:

First of all to avoid it from happening, please do a “stingray shuffle”, meaning to shuffle the legs when entering the ocean, then you can avoid stepping on them and they’ll feel the fluctuations and move away.

If it does happen:

Hot! Hot! Hot! Put something as hot as you can and as fast as you can, think boiling hot water to calm down the area. You probably won’t feel the hit and the poison feels like acid so you just want to stop the burn.

Wishing you good health 🙏🏻❤️