I have a related story about another type of poisonous spider .. the brown widow spider. (Yes, I said brown. Think of a black widow spider with a tan body and a yellow hourglass.)
I was bitten by a brown widow spider four years ago, while staying in a very nice hotel in Chicago. (I'll spare you the name, but it's located at Seventeen East Monroe Street.)
The spider must have been on a pillow that I put between my legs, because when I got out of bed at 7 AM, my left leg buckled under me. I didn't think much of it -- "I must have stepped wrong or something" -- and went off to work (I was teaching a seminar in the area.)
By 9:30 AM, I was starting to sweat and get really uncomfortable, and by 10:30 AM, I could not stand on the leg at all.
I was taken to the emergency room at Northwestern Hospital with a temperature of 104.9 degrees, and with my left calf swollen to three times the size of the right. My breathing was so shallow and labored, and I was panting and shaking so much, that the ER folks thought that I was having a heart attack.
I managed to make it through after two days in the hospital there and two days in hospital back in Seattle -- my doctor said "Normally I would complain about your weight, but your size saved you. If you'd been a smaller person, you would have died." (I was 5'9" and 310 pounds at the time.)
I mention this because, even today, my left calf is twice the size of the right calf, and I get doctors who (as another poster on the thread stated) simply think it's cellulitis.
And, to relate this to BRS … the previous poster who said that there were brown recluse spiders in Washington State was completely correct. We have brown recluse spiders on the west side of the Cascades, and 'traditional' black widow spiders and hobo spiders on the east side of the Cascades. I haven't seen brown recluse spiders east of the Cascades, but I wouldn't be in the least bit surprised to find them.