Diary of a Spider Bite

As some of you know, a few weeks ago I was bitten by a brown recluse spider. It was a Friday evening, and I didn't even know that it had happened. That night, in the midst of getting up four times to nurse Lane, I scratched the bite. Saturday morning the bite had swollen up a bit, but not enough for me to think it was anything more than a mosquito bite, since I swell up pretty badly when bitten by mosquitoes. However, by Saturday evening when we arrived at my dad's house, it had swollen up a bit more, enough to where my stepmom thought I should go to the ER. Well, I didn't want to go to the ER just to pay $1000 or so for them to write me a prescription, so I figured I'd wait until the next day and go to an Urgent Care place (the ones in Asheville were closed by the time we go there on Saturday night).

Sunday morning my leg looked like this:


The inner black lines are where I drew around the swelling on Saturday night before going to bed. The outer black lines are where it had swollen to by Sunday morning.

Sunday morning my leg had swollen even more and I was limping because the muscles surrounding the bite were extremely sore. I have a cousin who's a pharmacist that we'd be seeing later in the day at my sister's house, so I thought I'd wait until then and ask her what she thought. Well, the first thing she said was "you need antibiotics." So off to the Urgent Care we went. The doctor there gave me two prescriptions, neither of which I remember the names of, but one was an antibiotic and the other was a steroid. I took my first dose on Sunday afternoon.

By noon on Tuesday my leg looked like this:


The redness had gone down, as had the swelling. With the quarter there you can see just how much of my leg had been swollen!

I continued taking my drugs and by Thursday you could barely tell that I had been bitten:


Thursday morning. You can still see where I was bitten, but all the swelling was gone.

So, all this to say: if you're ever bitten by something and you start to swell up like I did, go to the doctor. Then you won't end up with a hole in your flesh. I thought about borrowing a picture from another website, but they're quite disgusting and I didn't want to make anyone puke. So...hip hip hooray for modern medicine for saving my leg!