An Ohio man who was placed in a medically induced coma after being stung more than 20,000 times by bees has woken up, his family says.
On Friday morning, 20-year-old Austin Bellamy was harnessed into a lemon tree where he was tasked with trimming back some of its branches while his grandmother and uncle looked on from below. While hacking away the tree’s limbs, he accidentally cut-in to a bee’s nest, sending thousands of buzzing stingers into the yard.
“He was just covered in bees,” Shawna Carter, his mother, said in an interview with WCPO-TV on Thursday. “Screaming and yelling, crying for help.”
The young man would end up suffering more than 20,000 stings from the insects that were later identified as African killer bees, his mother said the Ripley Fire Department told her.
The fire department in the small town, which is located about 50 miles southeast of Cincinnati, also said that they had to cut the 20-year-old out of the tree as after suffering the stings, he was unable to get himself out of the harness.
He was placed in a medically induced coma shortly after arriving at the hospital, as physicians worked to extricate the 30 bees from Mr Bellamy’s throat. In addition to the stings, he’d also swallowed dozens of the swarming insects.
“They were actually sucking the bees out of his airways still Saturday night into Sunday morning,” his mother told WCPO-TV.
In an update posted on the Ohio man’s GoFundMe, organised by his mother, she shared the good news that her son was awake and had been taken off the ventilator he’d been placed under less than a week ago. She also noted that he was still having difficulty breathing on his own.
“Austin is still currently in the hospital with breathing problems his oxygen keeps dropping and he still can’t walk very well still very wobbly but a lot of the swelling has gone down a whole heck of a lot,” she wrote.
Though her son was still in hospital and would likely remain there for a little while longer as he recovered from the thousands of inch-long stingers that were left lodged in his head, neck, arms and legs, his mother told WCPO-TV that she’s thankful that her son seemed to be out of the woods.
“I don’t know how I’m going to ever thank everybody,” said Ms Carter, before pausing to deliver a special thank you to the emergency responder who managed to get her son down from the tree and deliver a makeshift tracheostomy into his throat so that he could continue breathing despite the dozens of bees swarming around inside it. “Craig is Austin’s angel, he saved his life and means a lot to us."
The online fundraiser, intended to help offset the expenses of Mr Bellamy’s medical expenses and recovery, had raised more than $16,000 by Friday, well outpacing its outset goal of $10,000.
