Spiders
All Salty did was take a hike in the woods of a state park. At the time, we didn’t notice anything amiss. A thing like that shouldn’t take the wonders of modern medicine to keep from killing a guy, should it?
The scene of the ‘crime’; a pleasant state park
Spider bites are no walk in the park
Before the day’s end, Salty was feeling unwell, and developing a fever. The fever soared, until he was one degree Fahrenheit from the emergency room (whether he knew it or not) as I was starting to get real concerns about seizures. We waited out the night, the fever subsided, we made our way home the next morning. We were still thinking along the lines of random virus caught from public contact at this time.
Distracted by the fever, we hadn’t noticed the spot on his shin. It looked like a super-sized mosquito bite when we noticed it, the day after the walk in the woods. It continued to swell and redden despite topical antibiotic and a red finger grew from it to point up toward his heart. All the Nope! Time to get Salty to the doctor for some antibiotics.
The situation improved … until it didn’t. He was ¾ of the way through the first course of antibiotics when dusky red blotches started appearing on the lower leg and the swelling started to return. Another trip to the doctor and an issue of one of the newer, potent combiotic (containing multiple kinds of antibiotic in one dose) formulations followed. The leg improved again, but gradually. The doc ordered a second course of this combiotic.
Thankfully, this mastered the situation. The redness and swelling faded. The dusky red patches turned black. Some scars remain.
Salty’s leg bears some reminders of the incident. The dark patches developed between courses one and two of the antibiotics.
Suspect: Well, it had 8 legs… and spiders have 8 legs… so…
We think it was a spider bite. Some little critter, too insignificant to be noticed in the moment when Salty was climbing up and down ravines, found itself where it didn’t belong and made the only defense it knew.
What species? We haven’t a clue.
The symptoms don’t particularly match any known species, but there are a lot of undescribed many-legged things in the woods of even a settled country. Venom would account for the fever (which was high enough that a child would have been seizing from it, most likely). The venom wasn’t really the dangerous part, though.
It wasn’t this particular spider’s fault; it’s harmless. We don’t know for sure who Did do the deed.
Spider bites are infamous for injecting bacteria as a special parting gift. These don’t wash off well, frequently causing the bites to get infected. It was the infection that was the real danger. I am convinced that without the antibiotics, we’d either be calling Salty ‘Peg-leg’ instead, or speaking of him only in the past tense.
Take-aways for preppers about spiders
- Complacency can bite — in ways you don’t even notice at first. If this had been a back-country trip without an exit plan in case of illness, it would have been ugly.
- Be smart about when to upgrade your response. The tendency is to delay care when it doesn’t seem like anything should be terribly wrong; don’t let your ignorance hold you back from responding to what is.
- Antibiotics can be lifesavers.
- Antibiotics aren’t always lifesavers. If you are counting on the antibiotics in your preps, consider:
- Not every germ is susceptible to every antibiotic. Learn how to select the best, and understand it still might take more than one. This is a special problem for the varieties most preppers stock, as they are older and common drugs for which many species have developed resistance.
- It can take a lot of antibiotics to deal with even a single undramatic event such as a spider bite. Salty needed three courses; two of one of the more potent combos on the planet (better drugs than most preppers can stock).
* Thanks for the image to Tdot778 (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons