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2nd Story page
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of
the most poisonous arthropods found in North America: the brown
recluse spider. The dermatology surgeon was paged.
She herself was braving nature, out on Long Island. I'd have to
be admitted until she could make it back into the city. Or, since
I seemed otherwise healthy, I could go home with some antibiotics
and pain medication and visit her office first thing in the morning.
Her biopsy the next day, with an accuracy rate of about 60 percent,
confirmed a spider envenomation. I was given broad-spectrum antibiotics,
prednisone, and dapsone, an anti-leprosy drug. One month later,
I was still in bed. The dying flesh had slowed, but the red bull's-eye
rings around the bite had spread almost entirely down to my ankle
and up to my hip. The doctor offered nothing new, except to tell
me that these were nasty little buggers, so sit tight.
Soon I was on the Internet, armed with the worst kind of knowledge
(the partial kind), and communicating with a volunteer fireman
named
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Dale
in Illinois, who also had a brown recluse bite. Only when we exchanged
digital photos, it turned out that he had a football-sized chunk taken
out of his thigh, and mine was now just the size of a quarter. Dale
forwarded me links to the Recluse Community Project, among other sites,
where I learned that brown recluses are not indigenous to New York State,
nor anywhere nearby. They mostly stick to the South and Midwest. I visited
another hospital and was confronted by the same situation that had occurred
at Beth Israel:
the camera came out, and every staff member was called in to stare at
my wound and shake his or her head. They concluded that the culprit
was probably some sort of spider. Someone suggested Lyme disease, but
another person dismissed that idea. "No way," he said flatly. "Deer
ticks don't leave bites like that." Another month passed, and I was
still bedridden, now so sore that walking was a problem. I was avoiding
the stench of summer, but because of the compulsory confinement, I actually
missed it. At that point, I would have given almost
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