Cali Kid Corals

How dangerous is the stuff in our reefs to us?

S

sfsuphysics

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The other day, see "g/f helped me clean" topic, I poked/scraped/scratched myself against the rocks near the bottom (her arms couldn't reach), and man does it hurt like hell now, in fact my knuckle/back of hand is swollen pretty good and is quite red and painful to touch/move (hey typing hurts too!). If it doesn't get any better by tomorrow I'm calling the doc, but I've never been in this much pain by getting poked by anything in my tank. Hell even the foxface incident didn't hurt this long.

I'm guessing it's some sort of bacterial infection from getting scraped/poked but jesus it doesn't look pretty.
 
To make a short story long.....


When I worked at World Wide Aquarium, I cut my hand in the tiniest fashion, right on the knuckle of the right hand. We had gotten a trans ship from Indo late in the evening, and I had received the cut while unpacking fish/coral. Grabbed a hoagie or something on the way home ~11:30, the cut happened ~10:30. Got home ~12:30, choked down food, and went to bed. The next morning I woke up ~8:30 with a lot of pain, and what felt like a heat pack on my hand. I looked down to see lovely gray/black streaks all the way to mid bicep. If you've ever gone to the emergency room, and seen a doctor turn white as a ghost, leave the room and come back with two more doctors, I'm sure you'll agree it's not the most comforting experience. They did the whole Sharpie marks with times and put me on Vancomyacin (sp), and Sulfa. I never found out what the bug was nor do I care, I was very lucky not to loose the middle finger and part of my metacarpal. The whole time my mom is telling me "see you should have gone to Johnson & Wales".

That was 15 years ago, and I still don't wear gloves, haven't gotten any infections, they scare me the most. I've been stung by Lionfish, Foxfaces, I work with a porcupine puffer that bites me like I'm a taco. Not to mention electricity and saltwater don't mix, you're right Mike now that I think about it it's a dangerous hobby.

Now go to the doctor and get that thing checked out.
 
This compares nothing to Jeremy's story. But, if I put my arm in my tank and don't wash it off within a few mins I breakout in hives. It lasts typically a week or so. It has happened a couple times, never very bad. However, now I make sure to wash off with soap and water after sticking my hand or arm in the tank.

Jeremy sounds like they may have thought you had the "flesh eating bacteria."
 
Well I finally went to the doctor, the infection was pretty bad, pretty much all the valleys between my knuckles were gone due to the swelling. Then it took a couple phds in chemistry and biology to say words like systemic infection, etc, pretty much from my knuckle to wrist was red in a V shape.

Well Kaiser cleaned it, took a culture, and put me on two types of antibiotics, so we'll see how it goes.

So yeah important safety tip, if working on the tank and you get "nicked" and the wound starts to swell up go to the doctor :D
 
hehe it didn't look as bad as Jeremy described. But I will be very curious about the results from the culture they took just to know :D

My worst case thinking was "christ I have palythoas all around that area where I scraped/poked myself!"
 
Get any info on the infection?

Was it some kind of Vibrio? What meds did they give you?

I'm not really concerned about your hand....

:D

But you'd been having random unexplained RTN, so.....

Feel like dosing some erythromycin in your tank?

I'm tempted to do some experiments myself.
 
They gave me antibiotics from the get go, they gave me sulfamethoxazl and cephalexin because there's that AB strain of staph going around and they just wanted to make sure. Unfortunately they told me they were unable to culture what they swabbed, so unknown what was going on there.

The hurt didn't occur in my stony tank though, it was in my softie tank that's doing fine, if you ignore the red poofy algae and planeria.
 
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