Getting Bit

I have two bite stories and they both begin in freight rail yards. Both bites happened while I was asleep, one in an empty box car outside of Sacramento, and the other on a patch of grass surrounded by piles of towering rust. The first, which might have been expected in a pitch-dark car coated in signs of disuse—bits of trash, fluffs of that cotton-esque tree stuff, rust in the wrong places—started with a bang, leaving me with a swollen, red mound on my forearm roughly the same size as the forearm itself. Nervously, I waited it out in a nearby bus shelter, expecting that at any moment the arm would split open, splashing spider pus or, worse, baby spider pus, on everything in sight.

Things settled down quickly, however, and I realized that, no, I wasn't hosting a spider nursery within my arm flesh. That evening, one of my feet slipped off the wet rung of a metal ladder as I attempted a sketchy running-speed mount of a rather sketchy variety of rail car. As gravity pulled my now dangling self back into the grinding steel maw of wheels and coupling mechanisms, I pushed backwards, blindly hurtling myself out over a steep, tall pile of rock ballast. The injuries were enough to make me forget the bite completely.

The next bite wasn't so easy. It started with barely a whimper, the slightest scratch underneath a heavy wool sock. I went to bed that night with an itch, and woke up with a peculiar, rock-solid white blister on my ankle. I can't remember if my continuous poking and prodding of it did the trick or if the blister just dropped off on its own, but later the next day it had become an ashy black circle, as if someone had put a cigarette out there. It wasn't like a scab; I couldn't scrape it away. It was really unlike anything I'd every experienced on my body, and, as everyone I showed advised me to see a doctor as soon as possible, I tried my best to ignore it. This, however, would soon become impossible.

A few days later, the situation was that my entire foot and ankle, from just above the bite site to the very tips of my toes, had become an absoute crimescene. It was like the skin was covered in several layers of the worst poison ivy you've ever seen, which itself was covering a swelling situation approaching watermelon status. While I was able to put a shoe on that foot, the ankle tissue literally drooped or sagged below the top of the shoe, like a circular inflammed meat curtain. Meanwhile, the whole site was absolutely weaping, releasing pus at baffling rates. I could soak through a sock faster than I could even get a shoe on over it. It was disgusting and fascinating.

The doctor couldn't tell me what sort of spider did it, and I was given antibiotic pills roughly the size of my thumb from joint to tip. A few days later, the inflammation/infection had chilled out. What happened is a typical response to necrotic tissue (the ashy black spot) of the sort resulting from brown recluse spider venom, which acts to break down cell membranes, causing cell death. If a brown recluse had zapped me much deeper and in a place with a lot of fatty tissue, e.g. not directly over my ankle bone and not through a sock, it would have certainly been much worse.

Necrosis is interesting. It typically happens as the result of something weird that happens within a cell itself, causing it to release self-destructive digestive enzymes. The enzymes do the same thing as the venom, basically, eating the cell's constituent parts from the inside out, leading to the destruction of its membrane. All of the junk inside then leaks out, leading to an aggressive inflammatory response that prohibits the body's usual intercellular garbage collectors from doing their job. And so, rather than the body healing, the dead stuff just piles up more and more. There's just this mass of death sitting there, inviting some horrid infection. If there's enough necrotic tissue, you have gangrene.

Brown recluse venom is hardly representative of the vast realm of poisons packed by Earth's animals. The spider kingdom's other sketchy character, the black widow, doesn't have any enzyme action, doing its damage instead via potent neurotoxins, causing a condition called latrodectism, characterized by intense and sometimes bodywide pain, naseau, pouring sweat, and a fast pulse. It's rarely fatal but certainly miserable.

The American Museum of Natural History did an exhibit last year focused on the wonderful world of animal toxins, producing several companion videos, including the two below:

Finally, one interesting upshot of my spider encounters is that now I don't even give a fuck about spiders or really any bite-y, stinging insect. Bring it, assholes. I'll take you all on. Snakes, on the other hand, snakes can all go to hell.