Spider Scare
I was playing soccer with the kids in the front yard. Sonya sad down unexpectedly on the driveway and took off her boot. She yelled at me that she had a spider in her boot. After I confirmed the arachnid existed, I ordered the children inside and told Sonya to get Mommy.
I asked Sonya how she knew there was a spider. She said that she felt something underneath her foot and she thought there was a worm in her boot. I figured there was no way she had a spider underneath her foot without the spider biting her. I shook the boot to get the spider to crawl out. Fear and instinct took over and I stepped on the spider. What I saw was enough for me to call it a black widow. While I did not see the red hourglass, the body type and shiny black coloring was consistent with other black widows I have seen. we threw the kids in the car and drove to an urgent care center. We saw no evidence of injury, but wanted a professional to make that determination.
By the time we were seen by a physician, about half an hour had passed. Almost from the first entrance we could tell she diagnosed a healthy child on sight - she explained black widow bites cause a tremendous abdominal or chest pain . Meanwhile our little girl sat there smiling away without any symptoms. There was no inflammation anywhere and she had no fever. The physician said that the spider bites are rarely felt and hard to find evidence for, so caution was very warranted (check out the online warning: "People rarely die from a black widow's bite. Life-threatening reactions are generally seen only in small children and the elderly" ... "The decision to seek emergency care should be made early."). However, the prognosis was luck. In all probability, we were fortunate that this spider did not bite our daughter on that day.
Needless to say, we called an exterminator and I placed some glue traps for bugs. How the spider ended up in the boot is a mystery - did it somehow fall inside while she ran around the yard or was the spider somehow inside the boot for a while before falling under foot? Of course, I will be forever haunted by the image frozen in my mind when I first saw the black legs poking around from the toe side of the boot. Thankfully, that was the worst thing to happen that day. I'll take a dose of fear and a bad memory over harm to our children any time.
I asked Sonya how she knew there was a spider. She said that she felt something underneath her foot and she thought there was a worm in her boot. I figured there was no way she had a spider underneath her foot without the spider biting her. I shook the boot to get the spider to crawl out. Fear and instinct took over and I stepped on the spider. What I saw was enough for me to call it a black widow. While I did not see the red hourglass, the body type and shiny black coloring was consistent with other black widows I have seen. we threw the kids in the car and drove to an urgent care center. We saw no evidence of injury, but wanted a professional to make that determination.
By the time we were seen by a physician, about half an hour had passed. Almost from the first entrance we could tell she diagnosed a healthy child on sight - she explained black widow bites cause a tremendous abdominal or chest pain . Meanwhile our little girl sat there smiling away without any symptoms. There was no inflammation anywhere and she had no fever. The physician said that the spider bites are rarely felt and hard to find evidence for, so caution was very warranted (check out the online warning: "People rarely die from a black widow's bite. Life-threatening reactions are generally seen only in small children and the elderly" ... "The decision to seek emergency care should be made early."). However, the prognosis was luck. In all probability, we were fortunate that this spider did not bite our daughter on that day.
Needless to say, we called an exterminator and I placed some glue traps for bugs. How the spider ended up in the boot is a mystery - did it somehow fall inside while she ran around the yard or was the spider somehow inside the boot for a while before falling under foot? Of course, I will be forever haunted by the image frozen in my mind when I first saw the black legs poking around from the toe side of the boot. Thankfully, that was the worst thing to happen that day. I'll take a dose of fear and a bad memory over harm to our children any time.
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