So I was bitten by a Brown Recluse

         

 




Look beyond 🔻

                So I was bitten by a Brown Recluse.

June 29

This is the earliest picture I have, taken two weeks after I was bitten. I had a different phone before this, so I lost all of the pictures before this. 

But anyway, beforehand this looked like a terrible blood blister, with the sac you see filled with blood and pus. It popped the night before this, and that left a really nice mess in my bed when I woke up. Here you can see all of the tissue that's just dead at this point.

Juy 7
Here the skin is starting to dry and necrotize. It was in the process of drying up and sinking in at this point, and the lighter color towards the upper left is infection. Lab testing said it was a combination of staph and pseudomonas, even though my doctor claimed it wasn't infected.

July 18
Here, it has fully necrotized and is curling up due to its dryness. There was no moisture in it at this point, and it was incredibly hard to the touch. You can also pretty clearly see the infection oozing out from behind it. At this point I wasn't cleaning it besides just in the shower, but I was keeping it wrapped in gauze.

July 21
At this point, I was rinsing it by spraying normal saline into it and then wrapping it with more gauze, so all the extra moisture was making it look all inflamed like that.

July 24
This is immediately after the necrotized tissue was cut out (using a pair of scissors and a spoon, pretty much). It had been administered iodosorb, which is an ointment made with iodine. It comes out that brown color and turns white as it fights bacteria, so you can see just how much crap was in there.

July 24
Here it is after all the iodosorb had been cleaned out. Pretty nice view of my fatty tissue.

July 27
Slowly but surely, skin is starting to grow back around the edges, and more tissue is growing to fill the hole.

August 1
At this point, it's still quite infected, so growth is severely slowed.

August 17

We have some baby steps with scar tissue growing in, despite the decent infection. The hole is more or less filled in at this point, but the skin still has a good ways to go.

August 26

At this point, the infection is starting to subside, and growth has slowly picked up.

August 26

September 5

The infection is gone, and growing has picked up by leaps and bounds. At this point I was able to stop using gauze and switch to a normal large Band-Aid.

September 26

All closed up! I had to continue to wear a bandage for a week after this due to any possible microabrasions, but my skin had finally grown back.

May 4

This is a picture from today. The color has dulled, but not much else has changed. 

Brown Recluse
The brown recluse, Loxosceles reclusa, Sicariidae (formerly placed in a family "Loxoscelidae") is a recluse spider with a necrotic venom. Similar to other recluse spider bites, their bite sometimes requires medical attention. The brown recluse is one of three spiders (the others being black widow and Loxosceles laeta, the Chilean recluse) with medically significant venom in North America.

Brown recluse spiders are usually between 6 and 20 millimetres (0.24 and 0.79 in), but may grow larger. While typically light to medium brown, they range in color from whitish to dark brown or blackish gray. The cephalothorax and abdomen are not necessarily the same color. These spiders usually have markings on the dorsal side of their cephalothorax, with a black line coming from it that looks like a violin with the neck of the violin pointing to the rear of the spider, resulting in the nicknames fiddleback spider, brown fiddler, or violin spider.

Story from https://imgur.com/a/1No63#rVunpr0