A Waterford woman left on crutches for weeks after being bitten by a spider has described the pain she experienced as 'horrendous'.
Ruth Farrell from Tramore had three weeks of medical attention after the bite from what’s believed to have been a False Black Widow spider.
The mum-of-four got the bite after a spider jumped into her wellington boot when she was helping to clear an area at her back garden shed.
“I didn’t feel much apart from a small sting at the top of my foot, I didn’t think too much of it at the time,” Ruth told Damien Tiernan of WLR.
“That was May 26; I know because I’d taken a picture of what I thought was this unusual spider before it disappeared and got into my boot; I used the ‘Picture Insect’ app on my phone and it identified it straight away as a False Black Widow.
"The area around the bite went slightly red that night but it wasn’t until a few days later that the trouble really started.”
The infection went all the way up her leg to just below her knee. She went to her doctor, who said she could possibly have been bitten in two places.
“To be honest I thought it was a bit of a joke at first, I thought there’s no way a spider could do so much damage.
"The doctor put me on antibiotics straight away. The infection is persistent, very strong, I’ve been on antibiotics now for three weeks.
"It was like as if my foot was burned, like something had stabbed me; and then my skin started to peel away. It was horrendous,” said Ruth, who has been on crutches since then and her foot is still bandaged.
Researchers at NUIG say the invasive species of spider, none as the noble false widow, is much more venomous than was first assumed.
It’s presence was first recorded here in 1998 and is now in at least 22 counties.
They got their name because they resemble the deadly black widow spider.
In one incident last year, a Co Waterford woman Maria Condon spent six days in hospital after being bitten by a false widow spider which ran up the inside leg of her jeans.
She said this week that her leg took three months to recover and six months before all the blisters were gone. “I had to take 45 courses of antibiotics,” she said.
In the past three years, more than a dozen cases of false widow spider bites across the country which needed medical treatment have been recorded.
Symptoms include severe pain, stiff limbs, redness and swelling and sometimes victims can feel feverish.
