US Spider Bites

[Fireball]

Recently a fellow nurse/coworker was bitten on the upper arm by a Brown Recluse. The debridements left her with a cavity on her arm about 1 inch in diameter x 0.5 inch in depth. In layman's terms a "chunk". She could not return to work for about 2 months due to the risk of introducing the microbes we live with in the health care profession. 2 months without pay. The wound needed to be packed daily with wet to dry dressings. She, like other nurses, could not afford good health insurance. So, she could not afford a home health nurse to appear daily to her home. So, she showed up daily to our place of employment and one of us- her fellow nursetrons - took care of the wound. When a wound like that heals it does not heal with normal layers of tissue. It heals by filling with granulation tissue and becomes a scar. Now she has a 1 inch in diameter x 0.5 inch deep scar on her upper arm. A U.S. spider bite!

Kudos for taking care of her!

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Spider bite on my penis at around age 7 or 8. Looking back on it now I kinda wish the swelling would have been permanent.

If you live in the US, it was probably a black widow. One of my younger brothers went to the hospital as a kid (ca 15) and concomitant with the other symptoms was a serious swelling of his glans meatus. The nurse told my mother that that was a symptom of a black widow bite.

Also, we had some serious winds here in California, about 8 years ago. Some spiders with a body about the size of my thumb (2.25" X 1"), and a large leg span showed up. Kind of a golden color, is all I can tell you. I was walking through the side yard, and felt the (non-sticky) web rub my arm like a violin string. I went and got a broom to throw at it; it fell to the ground (from the eave of the house, about 15 feet), and started to run. I had to hit it with that broom several times before it stopped moving. What a monster. For all of that, it probably wasn't poisonous to humans. Scared TF out of me, though.