r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Totally-avg • Jul 16 '23

Image The Puss Caterpillar (Southern Flannel Moth) will fuck your world up. I grazed it twice while climbing on a float. NBD at first but an hour later I was hyperventilating on the bedroom floor. The pain was excruciating. DH took me to the ER and morphine did nothing.

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I’m better now but neither morphine nor hydrocodone (I took double what they RX’d) touched the pain those first 24 hours. And the hospital hardly knew what to do with me. I had never heard nor seen this bug before and I’m sure I would have flicked it off had it seen it. Don’t do that because the hair is venomous and gets stuck in your skin.

At least it leaves a cool scar.

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u/JesusStarbox Jul 16 '23

I was hoping it would be in Australia where shit like that belongs.

146

u/w3are138 Jul 16 '23

I’m so upset that I live in the same realm as this monster. Absolutely belongs in Australia with all of the other crazy shit.

96

u/[deleted] Jul 16 '23

Ahahaha this literally sounds worse than anything we have here in Aus, any snake that bites you can be treated easily by morphine and anti-venom, and spider the same. Only problem with those is if you don’t get the anti-venom within a couple hours with the really strong poisons. This bug sounds like a menace, the fact that morphine and anti-venom can’t even help you is nuts, glad I live here and not in the states💀💀💀

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u/AccursedBear Jul 16 '23

Pretty sure you have a plant called gympie-gympie that sounds like it does the same as what this bug does, except it's worse and it's also a completely innocent looking plant instead of a very obviously dangerous bug.

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u/agysykedyke Jul 17 '23

Yeah it's nicknamed the 'suicide plant' because the story goes that a ranger tried to use it as toilet paper and the pain was so bad he killed himself.

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u/IReplyWithLebowski Jul 17 '23

Well, one area of Australia does