Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water
It was a blazing hot summer’s day in central Queensland, Australia, when Rachael Shardlow’s family – her older brother Sam, their parents, Ruth Macklin and Geoff Shardlow, and their dogs – decided to head for the water. But, the lake, river or ocean? Ten-year-old Rachael pushed for the dam, at Lake Awoonga. Someone had told her there were crocodiles at Calliope River, and she was scared. But the lake was a wildlife sanctuary: no dogs allowed.
Rachael would not budge – so her family called her bluff, bundling into the car and driving off without her. They had only reached the end of the street before Rachael caved in, calling them to come back and get her.
At the Calliope River rest area, a popular campsite a bout 22km upstream from where it meets the Pacific, Rachael was still too nervous to go swimming. When Sam and a friend got on a bodyboard in the shallows, she sandwiched herself between them, dangling her legs in the water.
Moments later, she started screaming. Sam, then 13, pulled his writhing sister out of the water and on to the riverbank, a huge gelatinous blob wrapped around her left leg. Rachael had been stung by a box jellyfish: the deadliest creature in the sea. It’s venom stops the heart, killing adults in as little as five minutes.
The jellyfish was latched on. “It was horrible. It looked like an alien, with all its tentacles wrapped around her leg,” Macklin says. “I tried to pull them off with my fingers, but they were like harpoons.”
By grim providence, a camper nearby had lost his brother to a box jellyfish and knew to run back to his campsite for vinegar to pour over the tentacles. With that, they retracted and the jelly could be wiped off “like snot”, Macklin says.
But Rachael’s vision had started to blur; she couldn’t breathe. “She said, ‘Am I going to die, Mum?’ Those were her last words before she passed out.” The man told them they had no time to lose: they would have to take Rachael to meet the ambulance, or she would die on the riverbank.
Rachael’s heartbeat was weak. She was given antivenom and rushed to hospital in an induced coma. “She woke up when we got there – that was the worst part,” Macklin says. Her whole body was flailing up and down in agony.
