If you live near the beach in Southern California, you’re going to end up playing in the Pacific Ocean a lot. If you play in the Pacific Ocean a lot, you’re going to have encounters with stingrays. I have encountered hundreds if not thousands of stingrays in my life, but I have always been careful around them and have never been stung. Today I was not so lucky.

I normally run into stingrays in the calm shallow waters, so I almost always do the “stingray shuffle” to scare any away as I move from the beach to the deeper water. Today was no different. I didn’t see any stingrays going in and out of the water, but I continued to do the shuffle, just in case.

When you get off your board, there’s no real way to avoid the possibility of stepping on a stingray. That’s exactly what happened to me today. I was in fairly deep water, at least 5 feet deep. When I stepped down onto the sand, I felt something bad. It felt like a large crab had pinched my heel really hard and possibly sliced it open. I wasn’t sure what had happened, but I knew it wasn’t good. It almost felt like I had stepped on a broken bottle and sliced my foot open. I didn’t initially suspect it was a stingray, because I was out so deep, hadn’t seen any stingrays all day, and I didn’t feel the stingray try to move beneath my foot when I came down.

I have accidentally stepped on several stingrays over the years. Almost always, you feel them struggle to get free before they defend themselves. There was no struggle today, just the stinger penetrating my heel right next to the Achilles Tendon.

As I hobbled back to the beach, I wasn’t really hurting that much. I knew what had happened, but it still didn’t feel much different than a nice cut on the back of my foot. I worked my way up to the showers and parking lot and finally looked down at my foot. There was blood everywhere. I was impressed. I think bleeding is generally a good thing when you’re in no danger of exsanguination. Blood flowing out generally means any bad things are also flowing out.

We alerted the lifeguard, who prepared a bucket of water “as hot as you can stand” where I would soak my foot for the next 2 hours. I rinsed my foot off in the shower before putting it in the bucket. I didn’t want all the crap I had walked through to soak in the bucket with my open wound. My foot continued to bleed while it soaked. The plastic bag of hot water in the bucket turned a nice orange color before it had cooled enough to require more hot water (and a new bag).

I didn’t really feel the effects of the stingray venom until that first time the lifeguard changed my hot water. My foot came out of the water while the lifeguard dumped it out and filled it back up with hotter water. As the lifeguard dumped the old water down the drain, my foot started hurting. As the lifeguard walked from the drain to the hose with hot water, the pain intensified. As the new water was being poured into the bag, the pain became amazing and started creeping up my leg. Soon my lower leg was cramping and my thigh felt like it was being squeezed in a vice. I’m glad I made it to the lifeguard before I started feeling those effects!

As soon as I put my foot into the scalding hot water again, the pain subsided. The hot water was far from pleasant, but it was much better than the alternative. Eventually the venom broke down in the heat and the only pain I had left was that from the puncture wound and from the sunburn my foot received while soaking those 2 hours.

I did manage to go back in the water after that, so it couldn’t have been too terrible, right?

Soaking my foot in extremely hot water