Beware the Toxic Bite of the Brown Recluse Spider

I’ve been afflicted by the poisonous lil buggers twice now. But the second time I was ready to lessen the ill effects.

Those who find injuries and wounds bothersome might wish to defer from reading this post and viewing the pics. Or maybe you can get someone less squemish to read it to you!

Life is fraught with little and larger dangers to us bipeds from the animal kingdom. Somewhere a bit smaller in its effects than a poisonous snakebite is a Brown Recluse spider taking a chomp into your skin and injecting its venom into the human body.

Wikipedia, the internet’s information central, tells us that the Brown Recluse (Loxosceles reclusa) is a “spider with a necrotic venom.” In slangy short talk, the venom is a flesh eater. And that’s just one of its ill effects on the body, as I learned from cold hard experience.

My eight-legged nemesis

Neither time I was bitten did I even feel anything as it happened. After the first bite back in 2007, I noticed a painful sore arising on my right hip that looked like a fat zit atop a big blister. I quickly consulted Dr. Internet and found pictures that looked much the same as the expanding sore on my side. I can’t swear it was a Brown Recluse that bit me, as I didn’t see the little bugger – could have been a close relative in the spider family – but all indications pointed in the Recluse direction.

Being a freelancer on a tight budget, I didn’t have health insurance, and the injury didn’t seem to merit an emergency room visit. I did call a doctor friend who informed me that there was no medical remedy immediately available, just keep it clean and apply medicated salve. That and hydrogen peroxide plus some liquid aloe vera I had handy did seem to at least ease the niggling pain.

Ick at first bite

Then the sore started to fester, and the necrosis – which the Oxford dictionary on my Mac defines as “the death of most or all of the cells in an organ or tissue due to disease, injury, or failure of the blood supply” – began to eat away at my skin.

Meanwhile I dove deeper into the net and discovered a Native American remedy for toxic bug bites: red clay (which is in fact more orange than red, but no matter). And they had it in stock at a wonderful South Austin treasure called The Herb Bar, chock full of natural health and wellness goodies. I mixed the clay with water to form a paste and spread it over the festering wound. Alas, I applied it to the bite too late in the process to have anything more than a small positive effect.

I soon had a hole on my hip that was the size of a quarter in diameter, and the toxic venom had necrotized my flesh about a third of an inch down to the underlying muscle. Not a pretty sight, and rather uncomfortable, to say the least. But the worst was yet to come….

Not a pretty sight, huh?

At the same time, I was having a flare up of a herniated lower lumbar disc that was largely in remission, and seeing an acupuncturist to address the problem. On my next visit, I showed the hole in my hip to her, hoping maybe her craft could provide some relief there. “Let me put a few needles around it to draw the poison away,” suggested Dr. Moose (yes, her real name. No relation to Bullwinkle J. as best I can ascertain).

The result was a ring of poison pimples around the necrotic wound where the needles were inserted. And more small toxic zits everywhere else she had where she’d placed needles at various points on my body to treat my hinky disc.

Then came the worst part of it. Through the weeks to follow, and up to about two months later, I felt somatically unwell throughout my body, plagued by muscle aches as well a fogginess in my brain. I wasn’t the walking dead, but I did feel generally like shit. That Brown Recluse poison is powerful stuff indeed.

Then about a week ago, uh oh, not again: a rising sore appeared on my lower inner thigh just above my knee. A Recluse had struck me a second time! But now I had the drill down. And to borrow a line from my friend Steve Forbert’s song “The Streets of This Town,” I’d learned what the Indians know. Before I hopped in my car to speed off to The Herb Bar, I hit the Internet. There it was on Amazon: an eight-ounce jar of Bentonite clay for a mere $7.49, and with same day delivery! Add to my cart and pull the trigger on the purchase.

A jar of the good stuff

When it arrived later that day, I took the advice on the instructions and mixed the clay with apple cider vinegar – another fine natural remedy for all sorts of what ails ya and other bugaboos – to make the paste and spread it on and around the rising sore. As it dried and flaked off I’d apply again. And again and again over the next two days.

It worked like a charm. The sore gradually receded, no rotting flesh. It drew out most of the poison. But not all, as for a few days after I felt achy, foggy and not at all well. But things turned out far better than before.

Not good. But not anywhere near as bad as it could have been

I share this story and info because, first, Brown Recluses and other similar nasty spiders are found throughout much of the lower 48 US states, and are especially prevalent in the southern climes. And spider bites are just one thing the magic clay powder is good for. It’s also makes an efficacious detox bath – I poured the rest of my previous red clay purchase into a tub full of hot water and emerged after a soak with my skin feeling clean, fresh and sweetly tingling – plus facial masks, burns, mastitis, inflamed or chapped skin and more. The stuff is the shiznit.

So I’d advise all of you dear readers to get some therapeutic clay to have around the house in case a Recluse comes out of its hidey hole with a taste for human flesh. And for all its other uses. Because sometimes Mother Nature can attack us. But she can also heal and restore.