About 10+ years ago, my brother was at his son’s house for Thanksgiving. He complained about some soreness and pain in his hand and oddly his son’s beagle kept sniffing at his hand, sort of obsessively as if he smelled something “off”.
A few days later after he went home, he went to his doctor as his whole hand had swollen up, red and painful and he had a bright red line running up his arm to his elbow and was running a high fever.
His doctor sent him straight to the hospital.
He was diagnosed with necrotizing fasciitis. He was admitted and put on IV antibiotics and wound care including hydrotherapy. At one point, amputation of the infected finger if not his entire hand was not off the table if the infection could not be stemmed. He lost part of his ring finger and much damage to surrounding nerves. He spent nearly a month in the hospital.
The doctors also tried to determine how and where he got this infection. A few days before he went to his son’s house for Thanksgiving, he had been removing fallen wood from his property near the Jersey shore, but he didn’t recall being bitten or stung by any bug.
They thought perhaps he had been bitten by a spider. Brown Recluse spiders can cause this, but they are not found in NJ so they were unsure how or from what he got infection but were pretty sure it was from a spider bite.
You don’t think they are found in NJ, but I’d be willing to bet there’s a whole lot of creepy crawlies there that the “experts” would say aren’t.
I bet they are...
MRSA. Nasty stuff. I had it years ago, and I went to several doctors who all proclaimed it a "spider bite."
The spot would become inflamed, develop into a boil that would grow as large as a baseball and be very hard and painful. I would suffer through days of fever and misery and eventually it would get better. It would reoccur ever so often and after the third bout with it I went to another doctor who was an old friend. (fifth doctor I had seen) He took one look at it and said "Staph infection. You better hope it isn't MRSA, because that's stuff is bad and hard to get rid of."
"We'll take a sample and send it to the lab, and they will tell us what it is."
It was MRSA, but they found it could be treated with a particular anti-biotic, and so that's what happened. Haven't had a bout with it since then, but it kept trying to get a rot started in my flesh, but my immune system kept managing to fight it off.
MRSA is community wide in some places.