...didn't bite me.
I woke up, wide awake, at 6 am needing to go to the bathroom (this is important to the dramatic build-up of the story). As I climbed back into bed and pulled the covers up to my chin, I realized my right-hand ring finger hurt. It felt swollen and like there was a cut right on one of the joints. So I felt the place and there WAS something wrong. And, yes, I licked it to see if there was blood. Hmmmm, couldn't taste anything. A little perturbed, I went back to the bathroom and turned on the light and BEHOLD: two bite punctures right next to each other. I hyperventilated a little. What sort of horrible, slavering spider jaws were big enough to make such a huge bite mark?!
(Much later I realized they could be two separate bites.)
Here, we need to add some background, which mostly consists of: there is a hobo spider egg sac in my kitchen. So, upon seeing the bites, my first assumption was I have been bitten by a hobo spider and within two hours my hand will fall off and then the poison will spread to my heart and I'd be dead by Sunday. Please play the "Kid A" album at my funeral. Thanks.
Half-awake, I searched Google, typing in different versions of "spider bite," "treatment," "death," "hobo spider," "progression of wound."
Then I made a thorough investigation of my bed. I have about 6 blankets on my bed so it was a little nerve-wracking. Then, of course, I realized I'd have to get back in that bed at some point. Vision: pulling the covers comfortably toward my chin and SPROING! out of nowhere, a loathsome eight-legger, fangs drawn and dripping, going straight for my face.
Some more background: When I was maybe eight or nine, back in Iowa, I was bitten by a spider where it lurked by my grandparents' woodpile. My arm promptly swelled up to twice its normal size and I had a lump the size of about two grapes where the spider had bit me--the bite punctures two little red dots on this burning, tight-skin-pulled, hurting lump. I remember my cousin Aaron taking me inside and my aunts fussing around me and making poultices out of things that didn't sound either right or comforting.
I have, what we could term, a history.
I remember when I was a kid, I played with daddy-long-legs. I picked them up and let them scamper across my hands and arms. In a swingset from my youth, there were these pale tiny spiders that hung like jellyfish from near-invisible webs. I named them.
At some point, I started hating spiders. I had nightmares. My sister and I began to construct elaborate burial rituals for spiders we killed...so that their families couldn't find the bodies and trace the murder back to us. Children must always protect themselves against the avenger.
The end of this story, thus far, is that the bite looks fairly average and
uninteresting.
---
NEWS FLASH!!!!!
9:10 a.m.: I have found and killed it. It was smaller than I expected, but larger than I wanted and now my bed needs to be reassembled. Stupid thing fell off its supports in my efforts to free up a bit of smash-spider-with-shoe space
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