A spider bite in the UK left me on a drip in hospital and taught me 1 huge lesson

I’ve never particularly had a problem with spiders. I mean, I’m not one of those people who would let tarantulas crawl over their face or anything. But if a daddy long-legs makes its way into the house, I’m very much the designated spider remover.

Flies I’m less of a fan of, so when I do get rid of a little eight-legged creature, I’ll try to scoop it up and put it outside to do us all a favour by being the natural predator to those dirty bugs. So you can imagine I felt pretty betrayed when a plain old British spider decided to try and kill me.

I don’t know how or when the little creature struck, but the effects of the bite were worse than I could ever imagine.

It all started when I noticed what I thought was a little spot on my knuckle.

I’ve never had one there before and thought it was a strange place for it to appear, but I gave it no thought.

Then it started to grow.

The swelling was accompanied by shooting pains in my index finger that wound right up along my wrist. Being a typical bloke I decided ignoring it was the best cure. These things get better on their own, I reasoned.

But the swelling increased. Hour by hour, my index finger began to resemble a red sausage and gave off some significant heat.

My go-to home treatment method, lathering it in E45 cream, had no effect, and so I decided to see my GP.

They quickly diagnosed it as an infected bite and prescribed antibiotics.

I expected the sausage finger to deflate once I started taking them, but it was no use. A day later, it was bigger and boiling hot.

So I caved and trundled into A&E. The concern of the doctors immediately made me sit up and take notice; they took blood tests and gave me an IV drip with stronger medicine.

I was then referred to another hospital nearby to see a specialist, as treatment was needed urgently.

Wearing blue gloves, the physicians squeezed and poked the injured area. It needed to be sliced open, they declared. They needed to poke around to see how far the infection had spread.

It sounded unpleasant, but I thought it was far better than losing a finger.

The operation, if you can call it that, took place on a doctor’s desk. The keyboard was pushed back and blue padded protective paper was laid out for me to rest my hand.

A needle was jabbed into my finger at five different angles to numb me to the pain. But when the doctor got stuck in with the scalpel, it wasn’t quite enough; I could feel the knife going into my skin.

Another shot in the finger and the slicing began.

I was advised not to look as they dug the hole in my finger. The initial signs were good, apparently, as there was only blood and not pus oozing out of the wound; this meant the infection was not too bad.

As the wound was tugged, twisted and inspected, a senior physician entered the room and peered over the scene.

“Have you gone deep enough,” she asked her colleague.

The doctor twisted her tweezers to prove she had. It was then I knew the anesthetic was wearing off because I felt a sting.

My grimace was seen by the senior member of staff, who gently suggested my wound be bandaged up.

Offhand, as the gauze was being wrapped around my finger, the doctor mentioned she’d found something in the wound.

“I removed it,” she said, explaining that it looked like the spider’s ‘tooth’. It was shoved in a test tube and sent off for testing. 

After another round of antibiotics from a drip and strong painkillers, I was sent home, having had a needle jabbed in what felt like every single available vein on my opposite arm.

In the week that followed, I was back in the hospital every single day.

The wound got “angrier” in the words of one of the doctors, as pus bubbled up to the top.

Stronger antibiotics failed to have any impact other than making me feel nauseous until the results from the spider tooth came back, revealing the bacteria left behind was penicillin-resistant.

In other eras, such an infection would have been fatal, but, thankfully, I escaped this scrape with a spider with only a diamond-shaped scar on my finger.

Going forward, however, my approach to spiders will be a lot more aggressive.

Have YOU got a story about being bitten by a spider? Contact zak.garnerpurkis@reachplc.com