ITSY BITSY AGONY
A spider bite left Jasmine Harris, 22, from Chichester, unable to walk…
Kicking my feet out of the bed covers to try cool down, I noticed two tiny black dots on the inside of my right leg, just above my ankle.
Odd, I thought. They weren’t there last night.
I felt the slight rise of a bump on each one.
‘Must be a mozzy bite,’ I said, reaching for the antiseptic cream. I thought nothing more about it. But a week later, my leg was starting to pulsate.
I rubbed on more cream, then applied a plaster.
Another week on, though, and it still wasn’t better.
The blood pulsed around the mark on my leg.
My legs went weak and I couldn’t stand.
‘I’m taking you to A&E,’ my partner Brian, 31, said.
He rushed me straight to St Richards’ Hospital in Chichester.
There, I was told it was an infected mosquito bite.
‘Are you sure? It feels like something else,’ I pleaded.
‘We’ll put you on strong painkillers, that should help clear it up,’ the doctor said. But the following day, I was vomiting at my admin job in a doctor’s surgery.
The pain was worse than ever, so I was sent home.
Leg throbbing, I hauled myself into our bath-shower.
Sitting with my leg under the freezing water to ease the pain, tears streamed down my face.
The cool water helped, but the second I took it away, the itchy, burning pain was back. Brian took me to the doctor again. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ my GP stammered in shock.
That certainly wasn’t what I wanted to hear!
But at least we agreed that it wasn’t a mosquito bite.
Over the next four months, my frustration over the pain grew.
Despite lots of tests, the only thing the doctors could tell me was that I had PVL – positive staphylococcus aureus. They explained it was a softtissue infection that can cause recurring and invasive infections.
I was given a host of different bandages and six different antibiotics to ease it.
Nothing helped. Meanwhile, the gaping hole only grew bigger.
A rotten, pus-filled, red-raw ulcer, it reached 17cm in diameter.
The pain was too much, and by last September, I had to be signed off work.
I could barely stand, let alone walk to work.
Bedridden, I lived in jogging bottoms to try and relieve the pressure on my sore.
By November, doctors were still stumped, so I was eventually referred to a dermatologist.
‘Do you know what it is?’ I begged, as he examined me.
‘This started as a spider bite,’ he said. ‘But the ulcer, that’s something else.’ Finally, I had an explanation. A chunk of the ulcer was sent off for a biopsy.
It came back positive for pyoderma gangrenosum – a rare skin condition that creates ulcers.
A condition I’d probably always had, but never knew about. The only way to treat the still raw infection was through dressings and steroids.
I was given steroids between last December and this March to reduce the inflammation.
The dressings would direct the blood flow to my ulcer.
The bandages were changed once a week, yet every time I went, I saw no change…
‘It’s never going to heal,’ I sobbed to Brian one day.
I was finally allowed back to work in January.
The steroids were working, but still the gash in my leg clung on. Until… This April, a checkup showed peachy skin. It was finally healing! Relief washed over me. Now I have one horrendous scar, but the worst is over.
Though these days, I’m always on the alert for spiders…
It was rotten and filled with pus