A Campbell County woman was hospitalized for nearly a week after a 10-hour kayaking trip along the Staunton River led to a serious spider bite.
Sherri Maddox was bitten by a brown recluse spider.
According to local Virginia news outlet Fox 8 WFXR, Maddox didn’t think much of the bite at first. By the second day, she went to get some antibiotics from an emergency center. And by the third, she was starting to get concerned.
When it was still painful the next day, Ms. Maddox looked for antibiotics, but the area became incredibly swollen and it soon became clear that the problem was serious.
“I thought I was going to die, you know, it was a lot of pain,” Maddox told the outlet.
At one point, Ms. Maddox said that she was hallucinating, not realizing that she had been transported from one hospital to another, instead of imagining that she was still at home.
“I’m almost 50, and I’ve been floating in the Staunton River since I could swim, six years old,” 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,” Maddox told Fox News.
“They told me they weren’t sure if I was going to make it, and I thought I wasn’t going to live through the night when they first told me. It looked like a big ol’ balloon on my face,” She added.
She was finally admitted into the hospital, and doctors quickly diagnosed her with a brown recluse spider bite. They treated it as such by giving her a dose of antibiotics to help kill off any remaining bacteria from the spider’s venomous fangs. Maddox also underwent surgery on her lip so that they could remove all of the dead tissue from the area.
The doctors told her that they weren’t sure if she was going to make it, and Maddox said in an interview with local news station WRIC:
“I thought I wasn’t going to live through the night when they first told me. It looked like a big ol’ balloon on my face.”
But, fortunately, Maddox did pull through and survive. Now, she feels extremely lucky to be alive today. She encourages others who find themselves in a similar situation as hers to seek help immediately so they can hopefully prevent something like this from happening again.
“If you think there’s anything wrong with your body, go see somebody,” said Maddox on her advice to others. “Because if I didn’t go see somebody, anything could have happened.”
What do you think about this venomous spider bite?
After being hospitalized, doctors realized that the bite must have come from a brown recluse spider, which is also known as a ‘fiddle spider’ because of the instrument-shaped marks on its body. Brown recluse spiders are among a small number of poisonous spiders in the US.
Sources: Awm, Independent, Timesnownews