A CARER who almost lost her hand to a false widow spider bite is now too scared to sleep in her own bed.
Morgan Curran, 21, initially shrugged off the venomous bite, thinking it was harmless.
But days later, her right hand swelled “like a boxing glove” and a £2 coin-sized black spot erupted under the knuckle on her middle finger.
Morgan, from Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire, was urged by her GP to go to A&E where medics hooked her up to an IV drip and monitored the festering wound closely.
She was pumped full of antibiotics and had to stay in hospital for five days – undergoing two operations to scoop out the infected tissue.
Now Morgan is urging anyone who is bitten by an eight-legged critter to seek immediate medical help – as doctors told her she could have died if she had not been treated in time.
“I’m okay with gory stuff but when they took the dressing off and I saw it I felt sick to my stomach,” she said.
“It was hard to imagine that was on and inside me.
“At its biggest my hand was like a boxing glove. It was completely puffed up and I couldn’t straighten my fingers because of all of the swelling.”
Morgan, who woke up with an itchy hand one morning in April 2019, believes she was bitten as she slept and noticed a spider on her windowsill that same day.
She said: “I’m convinced that was the one that had me – it had the skull-type shape on its back.
The carer initially thought the pinhead-sized lump on her hand was a regular bug bite and popped a couple of antihistamines.
But over the course of two days the lump started to balloon and the centre turned black.
“I thought nothing of it for a couple of days and then it started to look quite serious, it turned black and my hand was very swollen so I went to a pharmacist,” Morgan said.
“They told me I should go to A&E but I was going to a concert that night and I thought ‘no it’ll be ok’.
“That night it was very painful and I didn’t enjoy the concert as much as I should have.
“My GP said I needed to go straight to hospital and straightaway they put me on a IV drip of antibiotics and said I’d need surgery.
“The doctor said it was full of infection and that if I’d left it much longer I could have possibly lost my hand, got sepsis or worst-case scenario – I could have lost my life.”
After five days in hospital, Morgan was discharged and changed the bandages daily until the wound healed.
But she was forced to take five weeks off work and still gets “a constant numbness” in her hand when it’s cold.
“I definitely wish I’d got it checked out sooner rather than later, it might not have been so serious,” Morgan said.
“I check the bedding before I get into bed now. Every time I walk into the room I check the corners for anything.
“Some nights I can’t sleep in there so I go into the living room and sleep on the sofa.
“It’s usually because I’ve seen a spider, tried to get it but it’s fallen and I can’t find it.
“My advice to anyone who is bitten is to get it checked because the pain is unreal, and unbearable.
“It’s just not worth having the surgery, the pain and a constant numbness.”
