Factory worker Courtney Mates was seconds away from death following a bite from a False Widow spider.
Courtney noticed the eight-legged creature in her home in Chelmsford in the UK one evening before noticing a red mark on the inside of her knee. When she woke up the next morning, 20-year-old Courtney noticed the swelling had worsened overnight and began losing consciousness at work.
“I saw the spider in my bedroom and the ceilings are quite high so I couldn’t get to it. It was dark red with a skull mark on the body and a few had been in our house for a while,” Courtney said.”My trousers were rubbing against it at work so I went to the nurse at work who gave me some antihistamine. An hour and a half later I started falling unconscious and I was hearing high pitched noises in my ears,” she continued.
Courtney quickly went into anaphylactic shock and struggled to breathe. “We had to call the paramedics and they said I had all the symptoms of a bite from a false widow,” she added. Courtney who ironically has a spider tattoo, suffered five days of blurred vision and difficulty staying on two feet. Courtney is warning people to be on the lookout for False Widows.