Influencer accidentally films herself being stung by deadly box jellyfish

An influencer who had a run-in with the world’s most venomous creature while on vacation in the tropics is lucky to have escaped with her life and a scar.

Travel blogger Julie was wading through shallow water in the Philippines and filming content for a brand collab when she suddenly felt “excruciating pain” in her upper thigh.

She had been stung by a deadly box jellyfish and claimed the pain was unlike anything she’d ever felt before.

“I think I was screaming for like an hour, my voice was gone nearly because I was screaming so much, that’s how bad the pain was,” she said.

The young Irish national described the pain as a burning feeling, like a hot iron was being pressed to her thigh, while she could also feel the venom passing through her stomach, arms, and head as it made its way through her system.

At one point, she thought she might be having a heart attack or a panic attack.

“It was scary because we were on a remote island two hours away from any land, there’s no signal,” she said.

Julie was on a tourist expedition from the remote island of Coron to El Nido, a municipality on the much larger Palawan island, and thankfully, there was an Australian doctor and nurse aboard the boat she was travelling on.

Being familiar with box jellyfish stings, the Aussies were able to monitor her before she was able to make her way to a hospital three hours away from the beach.

Box jellyfish can kill a person within half an hour when the sting leads to heart failure. In less extreme cases, it can cause vomiting, headaches, difficulty breathing, and, of course, intense pain.

Jellyfish expert and marine biologist Dr. Lisa-ann Gershwin estimates that box jellyfish kill up to 50 people a year in places like the Philippines.

Comparatively, there is only about one fatality every three to four years in Australia, thanks to more sophisticated prevention measures, education, and awareness.

“It can take as little as three metres worth of stings on the body to kill a healthy adult, and it happens in less than two minutes,” Gershwin told Yahoo News.

“Not everybody who is stung by a box jellyfish will die… but if you’ve been stung more than that lethal threshold, then, yeah, statistically you are probably going to die. It’s really quite mathematical.”

Julie’s incident, which took place ten months ago, happened while she was in the water filming content for a brand collaboration, so she inadvertently captured the moment it happened.

In the footage and details of the incident on social media last week, a smiling Julie can be seen talking to the camera before she screams and the phone drops.

“Some people were like, if you weren’t on your phone maybe you would’ve seen it,” she said. “Maybe I would’ve seen it, but it was completely see-through, so I think even if I wasn’t on my phone, I wouldn’t have been able to see it.”

She said she didn’t feel the jellyfish either, just the pain associated with the sting.

Since the incident, Julie has been experiencing gut issues, which she believes are associated with the sting, which has also left a large scar.