Spider Bites

This is a pretty gross post. Don't read unless you are ready for something quite disgusting.

A huge boil occupied my roomate's leg for the last week. We couldn't figure out what it was and it just kept getting bigger. The poor guy, a few days before the boil showed up, he was diagnosed with Strep throat. I think this is just not his month. In any case, he being with out insurance, didn't want to go to the doctor because it would cost too much money. We were hoping it was just a bug bite that would go away in time. It finally got so big that it interfered with him bending his leg and so he went to a clinic to get it checked out. The doctor there though it might have been a staph infection of sorts (basically a skin infection) and prescribed him antibiotics- stronger powered ones than his strep antibiotics- and told him that if it didn't look like it was getting better in 24 hours, he should go to the emergency room. So he has been (and as a result, I have been too) obsessing about whether or not the boil was getting bigger or smaller, changing color, healing or not. In a matter of 72 hours, it turned from covering the entire lower part of his leg (below his knee) to a tight red nipple that was about two inches in diameter and a good half to one inch high. We were both weirded out but he decided to ride it out until his antibiotics were finished. Well, on Sunday, as he bent down in the bathroom to pick up something, his boil exploded and this greenish brown liquid just ooooooooozzzzzzzzzzzed out of his leg.

So, yesterday (Monday) he promptly went to the doctor's again to check it out. Upon looking at it, she told him that he needed to go see this surgeon that she knew so he could extract the material (meaning cut the stuff out of his leg). It turns out that he had a spider bite and that the poison had destroyed some of the tissue (or flesh for those of more gruesome persuasions). It needed to be let out of the body or else it would do more damage. The surgeon not only squeezed out all the liquid that had gathered there, but did some major scoopage of damaged tissue. He then showed my roomate this squishy mass and told him that the mass was his rotting tissue and that spider poison will typically do that to organic material.

My roomate now has a hole in his leg that has been stuffed up with some iodine soaked gauze. He has been instructed to not only replace that gauze once a day (which involves extracting it and restuffing it) but to stand in the shower and flush out the hole with water. One of his dancers said she got a spider bite once and had to do that too. She said in her lovely deep South drawl, "Oh, that's gonna hurt like a bitch."