[Sethomas]

Update!

The day before having taken that picture, I decided that I should invent my own strategy to defeating the spider bite rather than consult any insight that man's millennia of written history has to say about dealing with spiders. It's more fun that way.

I decided that the necrotic tissue was probably going to perpetuate the presence of venom in the area, and observation told me that it was functionally beyond repair and thus should best be removed so that new skin could grow in its place.

So, I took a loofah and scrubbed the hell out of the black skin. Scrub scrub scrubby dub dub. Eventually I got most of it off, at which point I splashed tons of rubbing alcohol on it followed by generic Neosporin. The next day (Friday) much of the blackness had returned, just not quite as intense. So, back to scrubbing, isopropyl, and antibiotic. I think this is about the time I took the pictures above. I got even more of the blackness out, and left it at that for the time being. I made a policy that any scabbing that happened would be picked off until it congealed into what I judged to be a healthy color. Much of Friday was spent scratching at it. Friday night it started to scab over with what I thought was a healthy color, so I doused it in isopropyl and antibiotic ointment. Then sleep.

Saturday morning I woke up to see that my pillowcase was covered in green slime, so I checked my neck and virtually all the inflammation was gone. VICTORY WAS MINE AT THIS POINT. Since then it's been gradually drying out and healing up, so I think this medical file is shut. My father told me to observe myself for the next few weeks to see if I develop arthritic symptoms, because that's sometimes a manifestation of spider venom.

Properly speaking, all spiders are venomous on account of that being how they kill their prey, it's just a matter of its potency on humans. A few days ago I thought it was possible for this to have been a brown recluse, but that it had gone away after just a few days should tell me that this was probably a wolf spider.

I hate wolf spiders because they're so big, so I associate them as having big painful teeth. I don't know how true that is. I once was shoveling manure in the barn at home and I uncovered a freshly-hatched nest of wolf spiders, it was like an entire wall was just crawling with hairy little bastards. That's another thing about them--they're hairy, and I tend to think that non-human hairy things are dirty. And another time I was working in a crawl space putting braces on an addition to our house, and there were probably half a dozen wolf spiders crawling around my body. I didn't get bit those times, so I have no idea why this time some wolf spider decided to share my bed and then thank me with a vampire hickey.