After a couple minutes I look up and Sean is waving, so I wave back thinking he's just saying "Hey look at me, I'm having fun at the beach with my son, on my day off, life is good…" It wasn't until I heard "Hiyas! Hiyas! Get Connor!" that I realized that it wasn't a happy wave. He was ACTUALLY thinking "Something just stabbed me, I'm in excruciating pain, you'd better get your son before I drop him!"
I run in the knee deep water and get Connor. Sean limps out of the water. I thought he had stepped on a rock or a broken bottle. I look down at his leg and his ankle is bleeding and he is in obvious pain. We somehow managed to wrangle all our belongings and the kids to the car. Even Colin could tell that something was wrong, I had never seen that little boy gather up his toys and leave somewhere fun so quickly. His exact reaction was "Daddy got blud? Daddy need a doctor?"
The "doctor" (lifeguard) bandaged Sean up and was pretty skeptical that it was a stingray, despite the fact that someone had been stung just days before. Sean was in agony, we raced home to treat his sting. Here is an educational tidbit thanks to Google.
If you are stung by a stingray, immediately immerse the wound in HOT water (as hot as you can stand), and keep it in hot water until you see (stop reading if you get squeamish) a stringy pus oozing out. That's the poison. This could take a couple of hours. So poor Sean had to spend his day off sitting in the bathroom with his foot in the bathtub.
Here are a couple of pictures from our 20 minute beach trip.
Just a few minutes before the attack!
The Aftermath....warning gory.
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