When reports emerged several swimmers had been bitten by a blue-ringed octopus at Sydney’s Balmoral Beach in recent weeks, some locals were sceptical.

“If anyone was bitten, they’d be dead,” one Balmoral regular told 9news.com.au.

But someone did survive a bite from the tiny venomous creature – and he has told 9news.com.au just how close to death he came.

Jaun-Paul “JP'” Kalman, 43, was swimming at Balmoral Beach – a calm, pretty bay near Mosman in Sydney’s North Shore – about 1pm on February 5.

He was about 20 metres to the north of the beach nets, waist-deep in the water.

He picked up a shell with his left hand, and as he looked down, he saw a blue-ringed octopus latched onto his thumb.

“Its little blue spots were pulsating incredibly blue, which means it’s angry, and it’s pissed off, and it’s biting me,” Kalman said.

He shook the octopus off his hand and said at first he felt no pain whatsoever.

Kalman got out of the water, sat down on his towel and started googling symptoms.

Then his thumb started to go numb. 

He decided to go to the hospital as a precaution.

About 30 minutes after he was bitten, he called his ex-wife Courtney to let her know he wouldn’t be able to make the afternoon daycare pickup for their kids.

Kalman intended to take himself to Royal North Shore Hospital by bus – a 1-hour-and-20-minute trip.

Courtney rang him back immediately and ordered him not to move so she could instead come and get him to drive him to the hospital.

“If it wasn’t for her, I’d be dead,” Kalman said.

“I absolutely owe her my life.”

They arrived at the hospital just before 2pm.

“By that time I had no real ability to talk, and all my strength had been sapped out of me,” Kalman said.

By 2.30pm, he was completely paralysed and lying in the intensive care unit.

“I could hear everything. I could see everything. I could feel them touching me. I was just completely paralysed,” he said.

“I was thinking, oh God, is this the end?

“I actually remember saying, I don’t want to die, I’ve got kids.”

As the paralysis from the octopus’ venom progressed, Kalman said he started to feel an immense weight pressing down on him and he felt his breathing slowing down.

“The easiest way to describe it is, imagine you’re in a flatbed clamp and all of a sudden there’s an elephant slowly pushing down on my entire body, and I could feel myself stop breathing,” he said.

“In my head, I’m telling myself, ‘Breathe you f—— idiot.’

“I could hear everyone talking around me. 

“My eyes were closed and were rolling in the back of my head, and I could hear them saying, ‘JP, open your eyes.’

“But I just – I couldn’t.”

Lying back in the hospital bed, Kalman was aware of everything.

“They would then open my eyes, and I could see everything, I could hear everything, I could feel them putting in all of the drips and the cannulas.”

He felt a breathing tube being put down his throat.

“And then I heard the heart rate monitor slow down incredibly,” he said.

Kalman was brought into an induced coma by an infusion of the sedative ketamine.

He said he heard the doctors clear the room.

“After they gave me the ketamine, I went on the worst mind trip you could ever imagine,” he said.

Still holding onto consciousness, he described a sensation of swimming through coloured bricks of light, before everything turned black.

“I resigned myself to the fact that I’m dead,” he said. 

“This is the afterlife, I’m going to be stuck here forever.”

He slipped into unconsciousness, waking the next day, alive but severely weakened.

In the hospital, intubated and filled with injections, Kalman clutched one of his kid’s toys to his chest.

“They reminded me to keep fighting and stay alive for them.”

He was discharged home on February 7, but another bout of paralysis came over him as he was walking at the shops the next morning.

Kalman was rushed back to hospital via ambulance on February 8 and saw the same doctors.

In his second stint in hospital, he was there recovering for four more days.

In the week after the accident, he suffered from two more incidents of short-term paralysis, lasting about 20 minutes each.

When he spoke to 9news.com.au, Kilman had just returned to Balmoral Beach for the first time since he was bitten.

He said it was to “conquer any fear before it sets in.”

Blue-ringed octopuses potentially all around Australia

Blue-ringed octopuses live in tidal pools and reefs around Australia.

The blue colour only becomes easily visible when they are threatened, so by the time a person recognises the creature as a blue-ringed octopus, it may be too late.

Most of the time, they just look like regular brown octopuses.

They grow to a maximum size of 20 centimetres outstretched and weigh about 100 grams.

Symptoms from a blue-ringed octopus bite include a painless mark with a spot of blood visible; numbness around the mouth, lips and tongue; muscle weakness, and difficulty breathing.

Anyone bitten is advised to seek medical assistance immediately.