Stingray stabs Southlander’s lung; expect more attacks with climate change

• A Southland man’s chest puncture by a stingray is a rare injury
• More stingray injuries expected in New Zealand due to climate change and warmer water
• Difficulty in treating Southland man leads to medical journal article

Jamie Cunningham’s lung collapsed after he was stabbed by a stingray and his injury was so rare it’s now listed in a new medical academic paper.

The left side of his chest and right foot were stabbed while he was at Oreti Beach, near Invercargill, in 2018. Fentanyl, morphine and ketamine did little for his pain.

The article was written by surgical registry Benjamin Black, research colleague Monica Londahl and consultant surgeon Konrad Richter and published Friday.

Cunningham’s chest injury was rare.

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Only a handful of serious injuries to the chest stingray had been reported in Australasia and even fewer fatalities, the most notable being Steve Irwin, the paper said.

Irwin, an Australian wildlife personality, died in September 2006 when a stingray barb pierced his chest, causing massive trauma. Irwin was filming on the Great Barrier Reef.

Cunningham, 52, previously took “feet” of skin and broke a collarbone while cycling. The stingray was ten out of ten, “absolute mental” pain, he said.

He had his kids boogie boarding on a hot late December day in 2018.

In about a foot of water, Cunningham thought he was standing on a juvenile stingray, which stuck in its foot. He believed he was then standing on an adult beam because the whole ground shifted beneath his feet and the adult stabbed him in the ribs.

He thought he had stepped on a shell and then a branch until the excruciating pain of the poison took hold.

“I thought this was a funny way to die. Not funny, but unusual, peculiar.”

He walked out of the surf, but could only breathe enough to say one word at a time.

His wife thought he was dying, but Cunningham recognized he wasn’t bleeding to death.

He said it took the ambulance about 40 minutes to get to the beach. He spent two nights in the hospital.

Cunningham’s main concern was not the wound, but the poison that locked his diaphragm.

He was pleased that his case was published in a medical journal so that medical professionals knew in advance how to provide better and faster care.

There is no antivenom for stingray toxin, and ray venom remains a poorly understood phenomenon, the paper says.

Envenomation [the venom going into the body] may cloud the clinical picture and delay bacterial infections.

Symptoms vary but may include sweating, temporary loss of consciousness due to insufficient blood flow to the brain, nausea, diarrhea and hypotension [low blood pressure] and irregular heartbeats.

The venom can kill body tissue.

Early exploratory debridement [medical removal of dead, damaged, or infected tissue]tetanus prophylaxis [stopping tetanus spreading] and broad-spectrum antibiotics are the mainstay for managing penetrating stingray trauma, the paper states.

Cunningham’s presentation at the hospital appeared to represent a more serious injury than what was discovered, the paper said.

The research paper was published Friday in the New Zealand Medical Journal.

The article cites a 2018 study saying that as climate change progresses, there will be more stingrays in New Zealand’s waters and injuries will become more common.

Cunningham has swum with the Catlins again, but won’t go back in the murky waters of Oreti.

There were no complications after that, but scar tissue on his ribs made playing his trumpet uncomfortable.

Another Southlander Stuart Sutherland, 40, also knows the intense pain of being stung by a stingray.

Sutherland’s lower leg was injured while fishing in January 2022, but he counted himself lucky when you consider what happened to Cunningham on the same beach three years earlier.

His incident is not covered in the medical paper.

He had a high pain tolerance, but the stingray was “unbearable”.

At 7 a.m. on January 29, he found himself in the deep end of a botnet. He thought “my calf was broken” or that a shark had bitten his leg.

He saw a flash of something black swim away.

“It would have been at least a meter wide.”

He felt the barb snap off.

“The blood just flowed out.”

He came out of the water and his neoprene waders were punctured. But when he saw that there was no gouge from his leg, he thought it was not a shark.

He said he had to convince medical professionals that he had indeed been stabbed. The wound was three inches deep, he said.

Sutherland said he was going home that night, but the swelling got worse.

More swelling as the pain subsided was a bad sign.

It took his parents convincing to go back to the hospital.

Sutherland underwent emergency surgery for compartment syndrome. The syndrome is where excessive pressure builds up in the muscle. He has two surgery scars on the front and inside of his lower leg.

Within three months he was off his crutches. Sutherland is back to work as a boat manufacturer, but returning to the sea would be mentally tough.

“It won’t be easy to get back into the water.”

Sutherland wasn’t sure how a child would react if stung and urged people to watch out for children on the beach.

Cunningham said stingrays weren’t aggressive so if you were in murky water you would have to slide through the sand and dig your feet in to make noise and the rays would swim away.