Yesterday while shopping in a local grocery store with my mother in law I had an interesting encounter.
She wanted some bananas and I was standing with my back to the bananas when suddenly I felt something that felt like someone shot me in the leg with a nail gun. As a person who studies insects and spiders I know instantly what just happened. I had been bitten by a large spider and likely it was a Brazilian Wandering Spider as they sometime hitch a ride on bananas.
Most spider bites are not painful. In most cases you do not feel it at all. I have been bitten by many spiders and only large ones like tarantulas or wolf spiders hurt due to the size of their fangs. But this was searing pain and not one of those spiders which is more like a painful prick. It hopped off and I did not get a good look at it.
So now I had to decide what to do next. The venom is toxic. It will kill you in around 12 hours. Anti-venom does not always work and I would likely be in the emergency room 14 hours before anyone even got around to asking me why I am setting there dead.
So I decided to trust the spider. It had no reason to kill me and unlike humans do not kill for sports or pleasure. In fact the Brazilian Wandering Spider only injects venom 1/3 of the time and even then only a small dose in most cases.
Most people I knew did not seem to really care sad to say. Most are so warped up in their own issues that they have lost the ability to care if someone else is dying. So I decided to go home and roll the dice so to say.
We are a part of nature and nature will take care of us. I was not angry at the frightened spider. It only did what anyone would do if they were taken to a strange land and trapped inside a strange place with giants all around.
So I waited. Well I had my wife clean the bite so I did not get a secondary infection. But other than that I put my life into the hands of a spider and trusted it not to kill me in cold blood.
8 hours after the bite I started to feel a bit sick. My chest got tight but not to the point I could not breathe. I go t headache. So I decided to go on line and play my favorite game: Star Trek Online. I played for an hour or so and decided to wait it out. The bite site was hurting pretty bad and I felt nauseous. I lay awake for a while but not worried but more or less bored because I really did not feel like doing anything.
I reflected back on my life and realized that I had not really did a bad job of it. I own my own home. I can afford to work part time and I had pretty much everything I wanted. So it had not been a bad run. I felt sorry for the people who show little emotion that I may be dead by the next morning. I pity anyone who has become that emotionally removed that the life of a friend or relative is not important. How sad and miserable must their lives be? As I reflected I realized that I would rather die than to lose my soul. To become so dead inside that a life no longer mattered. I felt that I could trust that spider more than I could trust them.
Pain woke me up this morning. I felt like I had been shot in the leg. Other than that I was fine. It still hurts like the dickens but the fact that I am writing this means that I am not dead. Jolly good.
So you see this spider could have easily killed me but CHOSE not to. My back was turned and it had me dead to right and unlike some wingnut who is "standing his ground" it chose not to kill even though it would not have violated any law as the law does not apply to spiders. It simply wanted me to leave because I was too close and it felt threatened.
I trusted a spider and I am alive. A 19 year old girl trusted the person behind a door when she went for help and he unlocked the door went outside and shot her in the face with a shotgun and murdered her.
If a spider that had every reason to feel threatened can decide not to kill; why can’t an armed human.
We can learn a lot from nature. All we have to do is trust the spider and everything will be ok.
James
PS I still feel awful and the bite hurts. But that is most likely because it had some dry venon on it's fangs from it's last meal, (just gussing). It will likely take a few days before I am back to normal.
