A Campbell County woman was hospitalized for nearly a week after a 10-hour kayaking trip along the Staunton River.
Sherri Maddox was kayaking on the Staunton River when the spider took a bite out of her lip, but she had no idea how bad it was going to get.
The pain was still around 24 hours after, so the woman started to look for antibiotics. Soon she realized that things were getting a lot more serious.
“I’m almost 50, and I’ve been floating in the Staunton River since I could swim, 6 years old, I was just praying I wasn’t going to die because I hear horror stories and you look on the internet and see all this stuff,” Maddox told Fox News.
Maddox says her hallucinations were so bad that she had no idea she had been moved from one hospital to another. She “thought it was because of the pain meds they gave me, but I heard from several different people that that’s what the spider venom does.”
“I just thought I was at my mom’s house or my sister’s house and then I’d get out and go look out the hospital room and realized I was in the hospital,” she added.
Maddox added that she was fearful about her diagnosis due to the stories she read on the internet about the spider and had concerns due to the bite’s deadly reputation.
“I was just praying I wasn’t going to die because I hear horror stories and you look on the internet and see all this stuff.”
Brown Recluse Spider
After she was hospitalized, doctors realized that the bite must have come from a brown recluse spider, which is also known as a ‘violin spider’ because of the instrument-shaped markings on its body. Brown recluse spiders are among a small number of venomous spiders in the US.
Thankfully, Maddox is on antibiotics and the swelling went down after receiving the treatment.
