Travel blogger Julie, from Ireland, had been visiting the Philippines when she squatted in the crystal clear waters and accidentally sat on a huge transparent box jellyfish
A travel blogger enjoying the crystal clear waters of the Philippines accidentally filmed the moment she had a painful encounter with the world ’s most venomous creature.
Julie, from Ireland, was swimming in the shallows of a remote island when she sat and suddenly felt extreme pain in her upper thigh. She realised she had experienced the full horror of a box jellyfish, whose venom can cause heart failure in people in extreme cases. Luckily for the influencer, also among the visitors was an Australian doctor and a nurse who recognised what had happened and were able to keep her stable.
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She was rushed to the nearest hospital, some three hours away, for treatment for the painful sting. She told her followers on TikTok: “When it happened I got up and I was screaming and in a weird state of mind, I was running and screaming. I wasn’t even crying because of the shock.
“I knew from the feeling this was a jellyfish but I was hoping it wasn’t. I was very hot, squatted down and I didn’t feel anything but when I stood up I felt burning in my thighs and on my butt and when the venom spread it was so weird, I could feel it. Everything was just vibrating, it felt like it was.
“Where the sting was, on my thighs and on my butt it felt like a flat iron pressed against me, it was so sore. That lasted a day.
“The tour guide picked up the jellyfish and it was the length of a man. It was bigger than me and its tentacle were huge and completely transparent.
“There was a doctor and a nurse on our boat, what’re the odds, they were just on holiday. They were from Australia and knew about jellyfish, box jellyfish and they helped me get through it because I was in so much pain. They monitored me for an hour because with box jellyfish they can give you a heart attack within half an hour and the neurotoxin can paralyse you if it goes to the brain.”
Julie had been on a tourist expedition from Coron to El Nido, a municipality on the larger Palawan island when the incident happened.
She added: “There wasn’t meant to be any jellyfish in this area or they wouldn’t have brought us there, this was a very rare thing.”
