Man Ends Up Hospitalized from 20k Bee Stings After Simple Yard Task Goes Horribly Wrong
A 20-year-old Ohio man was hospitalized after being stung thousands of times by bees.
Austin Bellamy was initially hospitalized in a medically induced coma but has since awakened, according to the Brown County Press.
Bellamy was trimming branches on a lemon tree on Aug. 27 when he cut into a bee’s nest, according to WXIX-TV. His grandmother, Phyllis Edwards, and his uncle, Dustin Edwards, were on the ground watching.
“When he started cutting them, that’s when the bees came out, and he tried to anchor himself down, and he couldn’t,” Phyllis recalled. “He was hollering, ‘Help! Help me! Help!’ And nobody would help him.”
The bees attacked everyone in the yard.
“I was going to try and climb the ladder to get to Austin… I seen how high he was… but I couldn’t get to him because I was surrounded in bees,” Phyllis Edwards said.
“It was very intense. We’ve never seen anything like it,” Tony Pfeffer, the Ripley Fire Department Fire Chief, said, according to the Brown County Press. “It took us about 20 minutes to get him out.”
Bellay’s mother, Shawna Carter, said the notification of her son’s accident “was just too much for me to take,” according to WXIX.
“It looked like he had a black blanket on his head down to his neck, down to his arms,” she said.
“He was hollering, ‘Help! Help me! Help!’ And nobody would help him,” said Phyllis Edwards.
Tonight at 10 on @FOX19 hear from the mother who says her son was stung by at least 20,000 bees. pic.twitter.com/GcglNBKX35
— Payton Marshall (@paytontvnews) August 31, 2022
On a GoFundMe page, Carter wrote that Bellamy was stung more than 20,000 times, and some bees ended up inside of him.
“So he had bees inside of him, and they suctioned bees out of him until Sunday morning [Aug. 28],” she said.
A Ripley Fire Department firefighter named Craig rescued him, she said.
“When I think of Craig, Craig is a lifesaver,” she said. “He’s Austin’s angel. He saved Austin’s life.”.
An update from Carter posted on the GoFundMe page on Sept. 1 said his recovery has been uneven.
“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.
CORRECTION, Sept. 13, 2022: We have updated this story to include the fact, initially omitted from our reporting, that this incident occurred more than two weeks prior to our article , and to add dates in two other places to provide important context.
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