North Carolina Woman Attacked By Fire Ants, Doctors Tried To Save Her Life, They Did The Best They Could, And She Is Going To Be Okay
Fox News – A North Carolina woman never thought completing a simple task such as yard work would result in a near-death experience.
Donna Kearns, of Archdale, was cutting through tall grass with a weed eater Saturday when she accidentally hit a mound of fire ants. The ants then “exploded” all over her, delivering sharp stings that “felt like pins going through you,” she told Fox 8.
Panicked, Kearns told the news station she attempted to wash the ants off with water, but began to feel ill before collapsing in her yard.
Moments later, Kearns, who was experiencing allergic reactions from the stings, was saved by a couple who drove by her home and saw her sprawled in the yard. Emergency officials were called and Kearns was rushed to the hospital soon after.
Fire ants are known to sting, especially when their nest is disturbed and the creatures feel threatened. In fact, according to Healthline, the ants attack in “swarms,” quickly climbing their way up legs and other “vertical surfaces.”
“Fire ants are notorious for their painful stings. A floating fire ant colony is 10s to 100s of thousands of stinging ants out in the open. Unlike honeybees, an individual fire ant is able to deliver multiple stings,” Adrian Allen Smith, research biologist and head of the Evolutionary Biology & Behavior Lab at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, previously told Fox News.
Donna Kearns, not dead. You heard it here first. She was stung all up and down her leg and collapsed in her yard. Neighbors found her and she was rushed to the hospital, suffering from a severe allergic reaction. Good news though, she’s gonna be okay. She survived. God was with Donna on this tragic day.
Now that we got the pleasantries out of the way, I have an announcement to make. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I wasted your time talking about snakes and bees and wasps and turning you against them because they suck and can hurt you. I’m not sorry because I was wrong, I’m sorry because while I was cooking up propaganda about why you should fear all the animals I don’t like, we’ve had fire ants down in North Carolina and beyond that should have been getting a lot more attention.
Not only did they put our dear friend Donna Kearns in the hospital, they’ve been floating along atop the Hurricane Florence flood waters on fucking ant rafts. I don’t want to speak for anyone else, but I’m not okay with this behavior at all. I like my ants hidden from my view in the grass, gathering little pieces of leaves and dead flies, and incapable of making me pay a multi-thousand dollar hospital bill. I don’t like them in my kitchen but sometimes it happens anyway, at which point I kill them. It’s no biggie.
What I don’t like even more is fire ants, notorious for their painful and potentially deadly stings, being so smart they’ve somehow mastered the ability to survive natural catastrophes more efficiently than humans. We don’t need villains like that out in the wild; I’ve seen enough of the Sharknado movies to understand what happens next, and it’s not good at all.
I know things are still pretty bad down South from the mighty Florence and people are struggling to stay afloat, pun absolutely intended, so I’m not expecting a full-on revolution in response to Donna’s accident. That being said, the people of North Carolina and the surrounding states inhabited by these monsters need to figure this out immediately.
Fire ants seem like the type of bugs completely capable of thriving and spreading their numbers while we all die of diseases and/or porn addictions until no one can go outside to get the month’s batch of adult magazines from the mailbox without risking death by ant attack. Once it gets to that point, we’re all fucked.