Virginia woman left hospitalised and hallucinating after venomous spider bites her lip

Authored by yahoo.com and submitted by Havvocck2
image for Virginia woman left hospitalised and hallucinating after venomous spider bites her lip

Sherri Maddox was bitten by a brown recluse spider. (Sherri Maddox)

A Virginia woman was left hallucinating and thought she was going to die after being bitten on the lip by a brown recluse spider.

Sherri Maddox was on a 10-hour kayaking trip down the Staunton River when she was bitten by the spider, but didn’t initially realise how serious the bite was.

When it still felt painful the next day, Ms Maddox sought antibiotics – but the area became incredibly swollen and it soon became clear the problem was serious.

“I’m almost 50, and I’ve been floating in the Staunton River since I could swim, 6 years old,” Ms Maddox told Fox News.

“I was just praying I wasn’t going to die because I hear horror stories and you look on the internet and see all this stuff.”

At one point, Ms Maddox told Fox News, she hallucinated, not realising she had been transported from one hospital to another, instead imagining she was still at home.

She “thought it was because of the pain meds they gave me, but I heard from several different people that that’s what the spider venom does,” she told the outlet.

After she was hospitalised, doctors realised that the bite must have come from a brown recluse spider, which is also known as a ‘violin spider’ because of the instrument-shaped markings on its body. Brown recluse spiders are among a small number of venomous spiders in the US.

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teneggomelet on October 7th, 2021 at 16:14 UTC »

In 2004 I got a brown recluse bite on my forearm. It caused a severe itching pain and started to rot the skin around the bite a few days later. Then wherever the bite area touched my body started to rash severely.

The fun part was going to the doctor. He got so excited to see a real recluse bite that he called in all the other doctors in the practice to come check it out.

The doc gave me leprosy meds to treat it. It was at least a year before the bite mark was gone, though.

imfm on October 7th, 2021 at 15:06 UTC »

After she was hospitalised, doctors realised that the bite must have come from a brown recluse spider, which is also known as a ‘violin spider’ because of the instrument-shaped markings on its body.

Doctors routinely misdiagnose other conditions as brown recluse bites, and I am assuming that since they said it "must have come from" a brown recluse, she did not have the spider with her to be identified by someone qualified to do so. Most people cannot reliably identify a brown recluse spider, and Virginia is outside the range of Loxosceles species, including L. reclusa. Anything is possible, I suppose, but the odds are against it. The media love a good brown recluse horror story, but there's not a lot of information here beyond a picture of a woman with a horribly swollen lip who believes she was bitten by a spider that does not live where she is and who, "heard from several different people that that’s what the spider venom does".

DrRevilo on October 7th, 2021 at 12:59 UTC »

Her lip, huh? I never would have guessed