Naomi Lewis has given birth to four children, but nothing prepared her for the excruciating and long-lasting pain of an encounter with a venomous stinging tree in Queensland’s far north.
She was mountain biking at Smithfield, near her Cairns home, when she came off her bike, left the trail and hurtled down an embankment, sliding into a stinging tree, known colloquially as a Gympie-Gympie plant.
The 42-year-old said the pain on both her legs — from where her shorts finished — was “100 per cent the worst pain ever”, describing the sensation as feeling like she had been set on fire.
“It was horrible, absolutely horrible,” she said.
“The pain was just beyond unbearable. The body gets to a pain threshold and then I started vomiting.
“I’ve had four kids – three caesareans and one natural. Childbirth, none of them even come close.”
Ms Lewis’s husband Richard drove her to a nearby pharmacy, where they bought leg wax to remove the fine hairs from the tree’s leaves and stems that had become embedded into her skin, injecting venom into her like tiny hypodermic needles.
They lay hair removal strips on the car bonnet, to heat the wax up.
“I had everyone trying to wax my legs, trying to get the stinging hairs off me, while I was waiting for an ambulance,” she recalled.
“I remember waiting for the ambulance and saying to my husband, ‘I can’t deal with this.'”
Ms Lewis was taken to the Cairns Hospital emergency department after the accident last June. There was little doctors could do for her other than provide pain relief and cover her legs with heated blankets.
“I was like, ‘Ooh, that’s slightly soothing,'” she recalled.
“So, then they just kept putting hot blanket on hot blanket.”
Ms Lewis was transferred to the Cairns Private Hospital, where she stayed for seven days, being treated with pain medication.
She went home with pain killers and “lived with heat packs strapped to my legs for a very long time”.
It was almost Christmas before she was able to wean herself off the medication.
And nine months after the accident, she still feels pain akin to someone “snapping rubber bands” on one section of her leg if the skin is exposed to air conditioning.