… on my knee. I got it last Sunday while watching fireworks (the suburb I was in has a spring festival every year for absolutely no reason - pity mine doesn’t). I got a large red patch on my knee the diameter of… oh I dunno, the width of a Post-it note. It itched and was red-hot for several days (I had fun freaking people out with “Here, feel my knee!”) and is only now starting to go down. I dunno what bit me but I’m suddenly very glad I don’t live near large bodies of water (fireworks were by a lake).
A spider bit me. It swelled up something awful, hurt, burned, stung, all that good stuff.
Where did it bite me? You know that crease where the back of your upper thigh meets your bum? Right in there. I’ve been sitting on cushions for the past couple of days. I haven’t asked people to feel it, though. It hurts! My husband saw it and thought it was an Unholy Boil From Hell. He’s been teasing me since, saying it’s really just a gigantic zit, and I should stop blaming the innocent spiders.
Easily, though I’d like to say in advance I thank all the gods in existence or imagination it wasn’t me it happened to.
The DJ at my previous job raised Rottweilers, and the majority of them were kept in kennels. One of his bitches was having a litter a few years ago, and he was sitting in the kennel helping her. He felt a bite on the back of his neck, slapped it, and didn’t think much about it for a few hours, she was doing fine, he went to bed…
Long story short, his wife woke him up about 4 hours later, and he had a roughly baseball sized lump on the back of his neck, and his wife had woken up because he had been “breathing funny”.
The ER doctor said if he’d waited another few hours to come in, he’d likely have been dead. Welcome to the world of the Brown Recluse.
He had to have pretty much immediate surgery on it, and while I don’t know for certain how far down they had to dig to remove all of it, I do know he had a HUGE patch on his head for well over a month, and the one time he lifted it to show us the hole left behind was more time than I personally ever needed to see.
Needless to say, I am completely paranoid about spiders down here in TX now. We certainly had spiders up in Chicago where I’m from, but HOLY CRAP, not like that.
As I was reading the roll over preview, I saw this bit and my thinking immediately went like this:
“Hmmm… spring festival, obviously living on the south side, probably Australia. . .
Bad bug bite, in Australia! Everything in Australia is deadly venomous!!
Poor guy. He’s going to die.”
I worked with a guy who was trimming bushes and got bit by a brown recluse spider. He had to walk around for a week with an IV going directly into his chest because the infection/poison/whatever ran rampant through his body. It was freaky.
Jeezus…I’m getting skeeved out just reading that. Spiders need to go. Seriously. I know they serve a purpose and all, but christ…can’t we just nuke these little fuckers off the face of the planet?
