One of my old colleagues in Chicago had zoas squirt and hit his eyeball. He was rushed to the ER, his eye got very inflamed and red. But no long term damage.
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And another time, I was working in a traveling job. Fragged on Sunday afternoon. And did my usual routine flying from Chicago to NYC on Monday morning. I felt more exhausted than usual waking up at 4am to catch my flight. Slept on the train, and slept on the plane, but I just felt more and more fatigued. Arrived at my NYC office around 9am, and by 11am, I felt absolutely terrible. By then, I knew it wasn’t just sleepiness. Something was wrong.
I had worn all my PPE (shoulder length gloves, eyewear, face mask,...). But I must have had an oversight such as taking off my gloves incorrectly. I quickly googled symptoms of palytoxin, and read it was flu-like symptoms such as extreme fatigue that set in and get increasingly worse within 24 hours. I told my boss, who was cool about it, and just said to text him and keep him informed. And I walked over to the nearest ER.
They did blood tests, and I told them this could potentially be related to palytoxin. And they pumped me full of saline solution (for $4k, ouch). Most of my tests came back fine; but I remember my ‘lipase’ levels. Prior googling showed me that some people will consider lipase to be dangerously high above 20 U/L and other sites say only above 80 U/L is dangerous. Mine was over 1400. That is not a typo. ...anyways, after a couple hours of just the saline solution, I felt a lot better! The doctors said I was lucid enough to self-observe back at my hotel for 24 hours and just call in if I need to. By the next morning, I was 100% again and went back to work.
