Black widow bite paralyzes Oakville woman

An Oakville woman remains partially paralyzed after being bitten by a suspected black widow spider while gardening late last month.

Joan Brunet said she was pulling weeds in her garden on July 28 when a spider latched onto her finger and struck, oozing a clear-coloured venom.

"I went to pull a weed and it wouldn’t come up, so I kept pulling and pulling," she said in an interview from Oakville-Trafalgar Memorial Hospital on Thursday. "The next thing, I had a terrible pain in my finger. It was the spider. I kept shaking my hand but it seemed to be stuck there.

"It seemed not to want to let me go."

Brunet said she immediately started feeling numb, sweating profusely and her vision started to blur.

She managed to make it to her kitchen, cleaned the wound with an entire bottle of rubbing alcohol and called her daughter before losing mobility in her arms and legs. An ambulance rushed Brunet to hospital.

"I had a terrific headache, my vision was blurred. The ceiling seemed to be coming down on me, the walls were coming in, the floors were coming up," she said. "I couldn’t stand up, I kept flopping like a piece of Jell-O."

By Thursday, Brunet had recovered feeling in her arms but still felt numbness below her knees.

The spider has not been recovered, but entomologists believe it was a northern black widow spider, native to Canada.

"It is something that is found in Ontario naturally, it isn’t something that is invading or imported," said Antonia Guidotti, an entomologist with the Royal Ontario Museum.

While black widow spiders sightings have been reported in the Toronto area twice in the last year, Dr. Guidotti said it is difficult to say how prevalent the spider is because they are timid and rarely attack humans.

"They are not very often encountered," said Guidotti. "They are very shy. They are not aggressive spiders. Once a female finds a spot she likes, she just stays there."

Bites tend to cause muscle and stomach cramps that can last days. More serious effects include difficulty breathing and in some rare cases, temporary paralysis. Death occurs in less than one per cent of bite cases, said Dr. Guidotti.

Black widow spiders are known by their distinct marking: a red hourglass shape on their black body.

Northern black widow spiders are slightly different, the female usually having red dots and two unattached triangles on their belly. Males, which are not poisonous, tend to be smaller and have lighter coloured markings.