Newstalk ZB
WARNING: This story contains images of a stingray injury Prosecutor Tobias Taane is used to fending off the odd legal barb. But wading in the shallows at Pāpāmoa beach over Waitangi weekend, stinging submissions from “the dark side” were the least of his worries. Taane was keeping an eye on his partner’s 4-year-old son when he felt a “chomp” on his foot. “I thought I had been bitten by something,” he told NZME. His first thought was some kind of fish, or a bronze whaler shark. “Freaking out”, he immediately tried to grab the 4-year-old who was just out of reach. Then he looked down. “There was just blood all through the water,” he said. He began to hobble out, as his partner called out to ask why he was leaving the water. “Then she saw all the blood, and started freaking out.” After clearing away the blood with some water, Taane said they saw “a great big hole” in his foot, and his partner realised what must have caused the damage: a stingray. The barb went in one side, and out the other, leaving a "huge hole". ‘It just punched a hole right through’ Other beach-goers came over to help – one gave him a towel to wrap his foot in, while another sprinted about 500m to a Surf Lifesaving tower. “By that point, I think [other] people started realising something had happened in the water, and the beach just cleared, the water just cleared.” The surf lifesavers who turned up hadn’t seen anything like it before, and radioed the main surf lifesaving club at Pāpāmoa, where there was a doctor and nurse on site. He was given pain relief and they helped him keep his foot elevated. To begin with, it was “not horrendously sore”, but then came the “surges” of pain. “I mean, I was able to grit my teeth through it,” he said. He was in fairly good spirits – even cracking jokes – and his main concerns were the pulled pork he’d put on the barbecue that morning, and a jury trial due to start on Monday. “I thought, ‘I’m probably not going to be able to do the trial’... My partner’s just going, ‘don’t even think about that. You’re bleeding profusely.’ And, at that point, looking at the foot, my pinky toe went purple and curled over,” he said. It turned out the tendons in his foot had been severed. He was also thinking how relieved he was that it was his foot that got the barb, and not his partner’s preschooler. As they waited, they were told by the surf lifesavers that there were orcas swimming nearby. “And of course, orcas feed on the stingray. So we were all thinking, ‘oh, that’s why the stingrays were coming right up’.” After about an hour on the beach, Taane said an ambulance arrived and took him to Tauranga Hospital. Taane was taken to Tauranga Hospital by ambulance. A surgeon cleaned out the wound with a piece of gauze, pulling it through the hole and out the other side to make sure there was no debris or barbs left inside. “Usually there’s like a pen-like barb still stuck in the skin,” Taane said. “But I think the stingray was probably a really big one because it just punched a hole right through ... So it’s straight through and out again.” Taane was stitched up and sent home late that night. Tauranga Crown prosecutor Tobias Taane was barbed by a stingray at Papamoa Beach over Waitangi weekend, keeping him off his feet and out of court for two months. While the surgeon suspected severed tendons, it only seemed to be affecting the small toe and wasn’t a major cause for concern. But a week or so later, Taane’s condition deteriorated. He was having very high fevers and becoming delirious as a full-body infection took hold. He was hospitalised immediately, “got slammed with antibiotics”, and had surgery to clean the wound out. “They reattached my tendons, stitched it all up, discharged me at the end of the week, and then basically it was just wound care for the stitching.” After about three weeks, the stitches were taken out. Taane said he soon noticed the wound was reopening, and the hole kept getting bigger. “So, yeah, I’ve just had this...
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