Spider Bite!
After almost 45 years of life, I received my first ever spider bite and it was a doozy, causing a $2,774 Emergency Room visit, and a week of pain and limited movement of my left arm due to inflammation around the bite. Even now, 12 days later, it still has not fully healed, albeit much better than a week ago.
Back to when the bite occurred, it was Friday, May 28 at around 1 o’clock in the afternoon while taking real estate photos at one of my employer’s units. As I like to prepare the unit to look the best it can, on occasion I will move lightbulbs from one room to another, if some bulbs are burnt out, which is what I was doing when I was bitten by a brown recluse. As I was taking down the glass dome, a spider’s nest fell from the dome, brushing against my arm, clearly, this is when the bite occurred, even if I didn’t feel it.
As I didn’t immediately realize that I had been bitten, I continued about my day, visiting another property before heading back to my office to process the photos. I even had my weekly Skype chat and game of Snooker Nation with my good friend James (Copper Ice), before finally realizing something was wrong about 11pm when I settled down for bed, and I felt some extreme chills and pain in my arm, this is when I realized I had been bitten. I should have immediately gone to the Emergency Room but hoped it would clear up of its own accord, as I knew it would be expensive, even with medical insurance.
Fast forward 48 hours and my left hand is starting to go numb in addition to a nasty looking infection developing on my arm, so I stopped being a stubborn [expletive] and let my wife, Erin take me to the Emergency Room. Where after a 20-minute wait I was escorted back to a cubicle, and the on-duty doctor looked at my arm, confirmed it was a spider bite, and said she would prescribe me a course of antibiotics, the rest of my visit was giving my life story and billing information, before being discharged.
Erin and I picked up my prescription at a 24 hour Walgreens, and I took the first of the 20 horse pills prescribed as soon as we got home. I really did not see too much improvement until a week after the bite when the pain finally started to subside, although the redness and inflammation were still prevalent. As I write this, with just two antibiotic pills remaining, it feels much better, and the inflammation is reducing.
As this was a workplace incident, I have started the process of claiming workers’ compensation, in the hope that I can get reimbursed for medical bills incurred. Which, despite my Aetna medical insurance not covering a penny, Aetna’s ‘in network’ discount did reduce the billed amount to $620.82, which is more manageable, but more than I can afford to pay, being a single income family at the moment. I have done my part, it’s now down to whether workers’ compensation insurance is going to fight me or not.