"patients believe they’re going to die and they’re so certain of it that they’ll actually beg their doctors to kill them just to get it over with,” Australian biologist Lisa Gershwin told ABC radio in 2007. They won’t die, as long as they get medical attention, but they will experience a cornucopia of other hellish sensations, as Gershwin explained:
It gives you incredible lower back pain that you would think of as similar to an electric drill drilling into your back. It gives you relentless nausea and vomiting. How does vomiting every minute to two minutes for up to 12 hours sound? Incredible. It gives waves of full body cramps, profuse sweating … the nurses have to wring out the bed sheets every 15 minutes. It gives you very great difficulty in breathing where you just feel like you can’t catch your breath. It gives you this weird muscular restlessness so you can’t stop moving but every time you move it hurts."
Ok, so less “sense of impending doom” than that certainty like with a kidney stone (before you know what’s going on) that the pain can’t be this bad without being a fatal injury.
Supposedly it does make the person feel like the end is near on a psychological level. The effect is somewhat unique to this jellyfish, so they gave it it's own name
It gives you incredible lower back pain that you would think of as similar to an electric drill drilling into your back. It gives you relentless nausea and vomiting. How does vomiting every minute to two minutes for up to 12 hours sound? Incredible. It gives waves of full body cramps, profuse sweating … the nurses have to wring out the bed sheets every 15 minutes. It gives you very great difficulty in breathing where you just feel like you can’t catch your breath. It gives you this weird muscular restlessness so you can’t stop moving but every time you move it hurts."