It’s true. You can get a spider bite in BC. A recluse spider bite. Recluse spiders are extremely poisonous. I got bitten by one, most likely the brown recluse spider, on September 03, 2013 at about 5:45 p.m. and almost 3 months later the resulting wound is still open, my foot and leg is very swollen and I can’t walk nor can I fit my injured foot into any shoe because it’s so big and also painful and sensitive.

The video further down the page shows me walking by the use of crutches 17 days after the spider bite. The doctor at the walk in clinic to which I went 17 days after being bitten and 3 days after being (ill)treated at the hospital was very pleasant and did his best to help.

His attitude was a million times better than what I found inside the hospital emergency. The reception at the hospital emergency was OK but the emergency itself is another story.

At this point I want to express my immense gratitude to my good and dear friends one of which took me to the clinic and another to the hospital. They continue to give me rides to doctors appointments as I cannot drive because of the injury.

One of my friends also took this video of me. He should have held the smart phone horizontally to get a full screen picture but I didn’t notice how he held it and he’s not a video person. I’m grateful for at least this level of video but if you don’t like the format I don’t blame you and I apologize.

In the video I suggest to everyone to kill spiders on sight. It’s up to you what you do with them. I used to often carefully take them out to spare their life. At least at this point, still unable to walk and in pain I can’t even do that even if I wanted to. When my foot is back to normal I may get over it and release the spiders that I find in the house alive.

I’m now more skilled in walking with the crutches. I just got them when the video was taken by my friend. If you get a laugh out of watching me struggling to walk with them that’s OK.

Watch the video below to see how a spider bite can disable a person:

Hospital Emergency Treat Spider Bites

With Antibiotics.

That’s All They do.

It takes 6 weeks to several months to get to see a specialist In BC.

I went to a hospital emergency 2 weeks after being bitten. The reason for the delay in going there was that I read on the internet that hospitals don’t really help with this kind of injury and in some cases have made matters much worse. (Yes, to the point of starting to discuss amputation).

It was only because of my wife and friends who were pleading with me to go to the hospital that I finally went there.

The experience at the hospital emergency in British Columbia was, on the whole, at least as horrible as you can imagine. I won’t go into everything that happened there right now, except that all those internet sites describing what happens to a person going to a hospital emergency with this kind of injury were right when they said that the only thing a person is given there is antibiotics.

There is no anti-poison or anti-venom for the brown recluse spider bite and it is precisely the poison or the venom from the spider that does the damage.

(I took the video of my foot which you can see just below yesterday, December 03,2013, exactly three months after the spider bite. What you see there is the spider venom damage, there is no infection.)

And the damage is severe. The spider venom which is very similar to snake venom basically liquifies the body tissues that it gets to. It turns them into mush. The venom eats through you and leaves a lot of damage destroying your veins, skin and flesh.

Although there are people who know how to treat brown recluse spider bites, they are apparently not to be found in BC and in fact in most hospitals in North America the treatment that apparently works is not used and it is often denied even when asked for.

People that know how to treat these bites are usually vets and they are in the United States in the states where these spiders commonly live. It seems that the brown recluse spiders are now living well beyond these known areas in places where they are not supposed to live, like in BC and California.

The problem in the states where the spiders are acknowledged to live and even more so in BC is, that medical doctors are largely ignorant about how to treat these spider bites effectively.

Worse yet, they won’t listen to anybody who refers them to the information about a treatment that has been done with good results. So even in the United States it is very likely that the doctor, the hospital emergency you’ll visit, will only give you antibiotics and nothing else.

While antibiotics can prevent an infection, they are totally useless when it comes to neutralizing or getting rid of the poison which  the spider has injected.

In BC the hospital emergency gave me an antibiotic drip and a prescription for a week’s supply of oral antibiotics, saying that I should come or go for another antibiotic drip the next day.

The doctor at the hospital emergency was the only doctor there and being very busy refused to look at the treatment that tens of people have had a success with and that I was asking for.

She promised to look at it the next day. I doubt that she looked at it as there is a different doctor in the emergency every day and, of course, I was never contacted by her to be told that she looked at it or anything else.

I was convinced that I had no infection from the spider bite and that was confirmed by the labs results after 4 days in which no bacterial growth from the swab test was found.

By the way the blood test showed a lower count of white blood cells than normal which any doctor should know means that there is no infection. High count of white blood cells would indicate the opposite.

But I was pumped with antibiotics anyway and was told to get another drip of them the next day.

There must be good money from antibiotics. Just one week’s supply of the oral prescription of them cost around $40.

Anyway, here I am, 3 months less 2 days since suffering the spider bite and after visiting a hospital emergency and making 4 or 5 visits to doctors I have not experienced any helpful results.

The last visit was with a specialist. The waiting time to get to the specialist was more than 6 weeks.

The specialist that I really wanted to see was booking for January and February of next year.

I am very sorry to have to write about the disturbing fact here, which is that the Health Care in British Columbia, Canada, the BC Medical system can’t treat spider bites in the 21st century.

Perhaps in the Middle Ages the level of care and treatment could not have been much worse.

I hope that you’ll never get a spider bite and should you be as unfortunate as me in this case and suffer the affliction, I hope that you’ll find a doctor who is not ignorant about how to treat it.

I strongly suggest that you go to a hospital emergency right away but make sure you ask them how they will treat the spider bite. If the only thing they offer you is antibiotics I suggest, if you believe that your wound is not infected, that you leave right away and find somewhere else where they can treat it properly.

Otherwise you’ll end up like me being injured and unable to walk for months. It will be 3 months on December 03, 2013 since I was bitten. The specialist told me that it will be many more months before the wound heals and I can walk again. He refused to tell me how many months.

By the way, the hospital emergency kicked me out of the hospital close to midnight and I had to ask them 3 times to at least bandage my wound before I go. They were telling me to leave with the open wound uncovered.

I won’t relate the whole story but the male nurse that was giving me the antibiotics drip infected my hand with the needle which he touched after spitting into his hand and then used it to pierce the vein in my left hand several times but he wasn’t successful in placing it into the vein firmly.

As he was trying to make the vein pop up and to get bigger, he hit my hand in the area of the vein several times with a dull object. Finally he succeeded finding a vein that was able to fix the needle in on my right arm, on the other side of the elbow.

There is more to the story but I’ll leave it out as it contains more horrible behavior by the male nurse and the other staff there.

I have finally decided to speak up about this because nobody that I encounter has ever heard of this kind of a spider bite in BC. People are shocked and can’t believe that the injury can be so severe and that the medical system is totally helpless and ignorant about how to properly treat it.

I am doing this in order to make people aware and hopefully to help them to take a more informed action. My experience has so far taught me that the system as such doesn’t care.

You can’t just go to a specialist. You have to be referred to him or her by another doctor. And when you are referred to them, it takes many weeks but more often several months before that specialist sees you.

That kind of time frame is useless, unhelpful and downright dangerous with a spider bite injury. All the damage will be done by that time.

The medical system, at least the way I experienced it in BC with this injury is totally useless and doesn’t really care about your health and well being.

I wish you all good health and to never need the services of the health care system.

Now it’s time for you to comment on what you’ve just read and seen in the video above.

Have you ever heard of poisonous spider bites in the area where you live?

If so, how were they treated? How was the person suffering the bite affected?

What do you think of the health care or medical system in the country, state or province where you live?

For the sake of all people who have never heard of poisonous spider bites in North America and elsewhere where the climate is not tropical, please share this post by liking it on Facebook, tweeting it, G+ ing it and bookmarking it on your favorite site or two.

 

Authored by Vance Sova

 

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