The timing is uncanny...

Last Thursday I came home and checked my voicemail (I had a couple missed calls, as I can't answer my phone while I'm on my Vespa. I could do it with my Bluetooth headset, but I have some behind-the-neck headphones that I wear instead) and there was a VM from Johnny Rotten, sounding drunk, saying: "Dude, call me. I have something to tell you, you'll probably find it pretty funny".

Before I could call him back, he logged in to MSN, so I said "Hey shitbag, what's up?"

He said "I got stung by a stingray today."

"Uh, heh heh, you did WHAT?"

Turns out he was holding a stingray out at Stingray City and he got knocked off balance by a large cruise shipper. As he was teetering off-balance,  another large cruise shipper knocked his legs out from under him. He fell onto the stingray, which panicked, flipped up it's barb and John fell onto it, getting stabbed in the leg before the stingray bolted off at mach 2. I couldn't stop laughing. I apologized, saying it probably wasn't funny, but he was the first person that I had actually met who had been stung by a stingray. He laughed too, but that might have been because of the four aspirin, five beers and six shots of Jack Daniel's. Or maybe it was four beers, five shots and six aspirins, I don't quite remember. In spite of all those "pain killers" he said he was on the verge of tears. He called Dr Denise and asked her if he should come in to the hospital, but she said as long as it was cleaned out properly there wasn't much that would do that he hadn't already done. According to his estimate, the barb went into his leg about 1.5 inches.

Last night I saw him at Calico Jack's, and his leg is still swollen, and the area around the wound had a squishy texture that I think is called edema. When you push on it, the indent stays for awhile. Like play-doh. Kinda gross.

Sunday night I couldn't sleep, and was laying in bed at 3am when the first IMs and emails started appearing asking me about Stingrays. WTF? I hadn't posted this yet, so no one knew that John had been stung yet. Turns out it was Steve Irwin. I read the article from an Australian newspaper that's all that had been posted so far and had a chat with Rich about it.

Since then, I've had a bunch of people ask me about stingrays so rather than type it all out over and over again, I'm posting it here instead. If you've come here from Google or something, and you're not my mother, my brother, or a couple friends who are usually the only readers of this, here's a little background on me: I've been living in the Cayman Islands since 1998 and was a SCUBA diving instructor for the first five of those years. I've been out to Stingray City and mauled/manhandled/wrangled the stingrays a couple hundred times and until last week, haven't even KNOWN anyone who's been stung by one.

I haven't seen the video of the stingray's sting on Steve Irwin, but I heard today that they might actually release it in the next few days, as grisly as it is. I couldn't figure out how it happened... the stingray's barb lays flat against their tail, pointing back. To get impaled on it by accident, the stingray would have to be swimming backwards pretty fast. They don't swim backwards. When a stingray is in peril, it lifts the barb up so it stand perpendicular to the tail.  Normally this occurs when the stingray is sleeping,partially buried, in the sand and their main predator, sharks, come up and try to chomp down on them. The barb comes up, the shark bites down and gets the barb in the roof it's mouth. It says OWWWWWW and the stingray swims away with or without the barb (they can regenerate them) while the shark doesn't get to eat.

What I'm trying to get at is the stingray's barb is a passive defense mechanism. There's no kinetic energy behind the barb. The penetrating trauma comes from the shark closing it's jaws on it, or a fisherman stepping on it in shallow water, or in John's case, falling on it. It will be interesting to see how the tragic mishap in Aus happened, if they do indeed show it.  They also didn't say what type of stingray it was that was involved, either. The stingrays we have down here in Cayman and at Stingray City are Southern Atlantic Stingrays. Their barbs do not grow to be ten inches long. I've seen their barbs up close and personal, and they're only three, maybe four inches long. They're black and they resemble a nail. A building nail, not a fingernail.

When the barb goes in, the spines create the entry wound and the whole barb goes in. Once there, as the stinger tries to come out, it leaves behind all the venomous goo around the barb in the wound (as well as making a jaggedy raggedy exit wound). That's what's causing John's leg wound to weep and suppurate still, as his body is fighting off the venom and trying to expel it.

What happened in Australia to Steve Irwin was a one in a who-knows-how-many million chance. First that he was stung at all by a stingray, and second that it managed to get him right where it did AND deep enough to cause fatal damage.