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Death and the Sun
SUKADANA, WEST KALIMANTAN, INDONESIA: JULY 2011
On the equator, dusk falls so quickly it often leaves me feeling bereft, though the sunsets and orange glow of the light make up in brilliance what they lack in length. One night in July 2011, my husband, Cam, and I were swimming in the warm waters of the South China Sea, watching the sunset from the special cove where we retreated most evenings. We couldn’t see a single dwelling—although it was only about ten minutes’ walk along a sparse path to the thatched roof house that had become our home in the little town of Sukadana, in Indonesian Borneo.
Silvered leaf monkeys chattered in the patch of mangrove behind us, competing with the cacophony of forest insects. One peak of the mountain chain of Gunung Palung National Park rose high above the mangroves, shrouded in wisps of mist and appearing deceptively close. The low clouds began to be lit by bits of pink, and a pair of sea eagles called to each other overhead. I found myself unexpectedly content. It was the perfect ending to a long day of caring for patients in the crowded clinic.
I had helped open the clinic four years earlier, as part of a conservation project designed to improve people’s health as the key to saving rainforest. This was a dream I had conceived eighteen years prior—about twenty miles from this very spot, deep in the forest where Cam and I first met, when I was studying orangutans on the western side of Indonesian Borneo. Cam had continued his research in ecology, striving to understand the complexities of tree species diversity in these magnificent forests. I, on the other hand, had taken a new direction—to become a physician, one who believed deeply that, unless both the environment and the people are healthy, neither can be. And now I was beginning to see, with great joy, that this ambitious strategy was no longer a fragile and untested idea for me but a solid success. In just four years, the staff had grown from the original eight to more than sixty dedicated individuals—and we were already seeing dramatic drops in illegal logging, in addition to impressive improvements in community health.
As Cam and I paddled and splashed, enjoying that golden sunset, I was suddenly overwhelmed by searing pain. My right hand reacted even before my brain was conscious of what was happening. I grabbed at the rubbery tentacles that coiled around my left arm and down my back, where they curled into the scoop of my bathing suit. When I pulled at the lashes, they stung my hand fiercely, but I didn’t let go. Every fiber of my being knew that my life depended on getting them off me. I was scrambling backward toward the shore, screaming, frantic. Neither of us saw the jellyfish, but we both knew that was the only thing it could be.
Reaching the shallow water, I grabbed sand and scrubbed the sting, but that just seemed to make it worse. What were you supposed to do for these toxins? Vinegar? Urine? The excruciating pain felt like hundreds of wasp stings, so anything was worth a try. I looked up at my husband, who had just caught up with me.
“Cam, can you pee on me?” He obligingly whipped it out, while I crouched in the shallow waves, and … nothing happened. “Hurry, Cam, I think I’m going to pass out!”
“I’m sorry—it’s just not that easy to pee on your wife.”
When it finally did happen, it wasn’t pleasant. Nor was there any noticeable change in the fierce pain. Staggering out of the water and sloshing myself clean, I gave Cam the few instructions I could think of. He wasn’t a medical doctor, but he was one of the most intelligent people I had ever met, and he had seen me through medical school. “If I lose consciousness, carry me to the house and give me a shot with the EpiPen.” I told him to call the two doctors I had been training and quickly ticked off the medicines they should give me.
Every step of the walk home, I doubted I would make it, but somehow I got there. We tried squeezing lime juice on the sting. And then I did the one thing you should never do: I went into our little lean-to bathroom and scooped cold water out of the half-rusted fifty-gallon drum and poured it over my body. The water ran off my skin and down through the wide-spaced plank floor and onto the ground below. I began to scrub the line of welts with soap—but before I could even finish, I started shaking from head to foot. I could feel the waves of toxin flowing through my veins as the fresh water triggered the popping of thousands of tiny pneumatocysts—perfect microscopic balloons of poison, each equipped with a tiny syringe injecting death.
My heart subliminally told me that it was about to stop. As a physician, I found this fascinating—Ah, patients know when their heart is about to fail. I could barely breathe, choking and moaning, in indescribable pain. I stumbled back into the house, where Cam caught me as I fell to the floor. Working in a place with minimal pain medication and almost nonexistent health services, I have seen pain—lots of pain. But I had never seen anyone acting the way I was acting, except sometimes women in the last pushes of childbirth. But this was different; intense fear was layered on top, because I knew my heart was moments from pumping its last pump.
People in the village had warned us not to swim in the sea because of the ampai. We knew the word meant “jellyfish,” but we thought they meant the familiar moon jellies, whose small stings were an irritating but minor nuisance. So, stupidly, I had not listened to them and had swum in that bay probably more than a thousand times. Now I got it—they must have meant box jellyfish, whose toxin is the deadliest thing on the planet. The firebombs exploding in every muscle could come from nothing else. No wonder they had warned us.
Cam scrambled through storage containers until he found the syringe he was looking for. He plunged the EpiPen into my thigh so hard I knew it would leave a large bruise—if I survived. The epinephrine flooded into my body. Half a second later, I felt my heart leap. I held my breath as a sense of relief reached my brain; at least the cardiac part of the toxin wouldn’t win at that moment. But every nerve in my body told me this battle was only beginning. Cam used his phone to google “box jellyfish” and discovered that their venom is one hundred times stronger than that of the king cobra we had once had in our kitchen. How could I possibly survive this?
Many hours later, it was 2:00 a.m., and at least fifty people were crowded with me in the clinic. Most of us, including myself, were sure I would die. The action of the neurologic part of the toxin was bringing every muscle in my body to contractions that felt like a seven on a scale of ten—every muscle. Then, one after another, each went to the maximum contraction of ten: the perfect outline could be traced beneath the skin, where my muscles stood out in the most excruciating cramp one could imagine. Each one was horribly painful when it fully contracted, but the absolute worst—and most dangerous—was the diaphragm. With the diaphragm in spasm, one cannot breathe. And that was what was happening to me. I pursed my lips against the pain, trying desperately to suck in a tiny bit of air. I writhed almost constantly, no position tolerable.
In lucid moments, I wished for an anatomy book. Muscles I only dimly recalled from medical school would announce themselves in a visible outline and leave me crying. When the one that controls the tiniest bone in the body, the stapes bone in the inner ear, sent out stabbing pain, it was all I could do to keep from screaming.
Copyright © 2021 by Kinari Webb.