TAMPA, FLA. (WSVN) - A woman was stabbed in the back but there was no need for an arrest in this case. While wading in the water, she was caught in a stinging situation when a venomous stingray sunk its barb into her back.
“I remember saying, ‘I’m going to black out, I’m about to black out,'” Kristie O’Brien said.
O’Brien talked about the stingray strike that sent her to the hospital for at least a week.
She was at Bahia Beach in Ruskin, outside Tampa, on Tuesday when she went in and waded in knee-deep water.
When she leaned back to wet her hair, she felt a sharp stab in her back.
She then leaned forward, and her husband saw an angry stingray on her back, hanging by its tail.
It pierced her four inches deep, missing her lungs by just centimeters.
Paramedics arrived at the scene and went in the water to free her.
“I know they had put the IV in while I was still standing on the beach because I told them, ‘I need fluids, I need pain medicine, I’m about to pass out, I need some oxygen,'” O’Brien said.
They used shears to cut the stingray at the base of its tail.
A trauma team at the hospital then removed the rest.
O’Brien survived in part to the paramedics and the fact she did not pull the barb out.
That’s what the late crocodile hunter Steve Irwin did when he was stung by a stingray in 2006 while filming in the Great Barrier Reef, which killed him.
According to wildlife officials, beachgoers should practice the “Stingray Shuffle,” which is simply to move your feet along the sea floor. The shuffling sends vibrations that scares away stingrays.
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