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Bri Oteri of Dade City, Florida recently posted on Facebook about being hospitalized after being stung by a puss caterpillar.
"I was leaning on this wooden fence and immediately felt my wrist burning," she wrote in a post that has been shared more than 39,000 times. "I started screaming for my brother to get it off me. He had no clue what was. It felt like fire ants in that moment. I looked down and saw this fuzzy thing moving across the wood."
She said after an EMT cleaned her up, she went about her morning. Later on, the pain struck again through her chest and all the way up her arm. Oteri immediately went to the emergency room.
"Morphine didn’t even touch the pain. I cried and pleaded with God for hours to make it stop. I’ve had 2 C-sections, other surgeries, and nothing came close to the pain. It felt like someone was drilling into my bones."
"It's not an instantaneous shock of a hornet or wasp, but it builds for a long time in a frightening way," David Wagner, an entomologist at the University of Connecticut, tells USA TODAY. "No one expects stings to gain in impact or discomfort, and these will, even up to an hour later. It packs quite a wallop."
The sting from a puss caterpillar can cause severe pain and could even leave behind a hematoma, said Wagner.
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