A mother of four said she underwent two operations after she was bitten by a spider while she was in the bathroom.
Lauren Boddy, 27, of England, said she was using the bathroom when she spotted a red mark on her leg.
It didn’t hurt much on the first day. But on the second day, Boddy said that she was in agony.
“I could barely put any weight on the leg,” she told Yahoo, adding that the mark kept getting bigger, red, and it looked like it was filled with liquid.
“It was really bizarre. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life,” she said.
Boddy said that doctors prescribed antibiotics and sent her home. Two days later, she got sicker.
“I was shivering, had a red line running down my thigh and the bite area was oozing pus,” she said, News Ltd. reported.
When she went back to the hospital, she was taken in and placed on an antibiotic drip.
Doctors found the bite and said they needed to operate on her. “It was such a big hole that they had to pack it, it couldn’t be stitched. I had to go back every other day to have it seen to,” Boddy said.
After the bite cleared up, Boddy said that she cleaned her home and bleached her kids’ playhouse.
But weeks later, she felt a bite on her back and was taken to the hospital again.
“This time, surgeons had to take a chunk of skin from my lower back, even removed some of my tattoo. I was gutted,” she said. “The wound is quite deep, about 7 cm. It’s not very nice. I’ve been left with bad scars on my leg and back.”
Boddy captured a photo of the spider after capturing it in a jar. She believes it’s a woodlouse spider, but it’s unclear if that’s the case.
Woodlouse spider (Dysdera crocata). (Mvuijlst at English Wikipedia via GNU/General Public License)“I know it sounds cruel, if I see any spider now I kill them. It horrifies me. I’m worried they’ll come back,” Boddy said. “Mums need to be very vigilant. People are too laid back.”
“I know kids should be able to go out and explore but you need to be vigilant, to see what they’re picking up and what’s around. It’s really scary.”
The woodlouse spider also has other common names—woodlouse hunter, sowbug hunter, sowbug killer, pillbug hunter, and slater spider. They’re found across Europe, parts of eastern North America, in southwestern South America, northern Africa, the southeastern portion of Australian, and most of Asia.
They are known to bite humans if they are handled, and it is believed that the spider’s venom causes no medical problems.
The woodlouse spider can be confused with the highly venomous brown recluse spider, said experts.
According to the University of California’s website, the woodlouse spider “has six eyes, which are grouped closely together in triads near the anterior margin of the cephalothorax. Despite this and the lack of bodily pigmentary pattern, the woodlouse spider is commonly misidentified as a brown recluse. It is found throughout the U.S.”
A brown recluse spider (Sleepisfortheweak. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.)
