A MOTHER of three nearly died after suffering a spider bite while on holiday.
Sue Isaac, 58, from Braintree, was on a six-week retirement break with a friend in Almeria, Spain, last July when she felt a sting similar to that of a bee on her leg.
But after three weeks that sting developed into a life-threatening, bacteria-filled lesion on her thigh that left her unable to return home for seven months.
"I was sitting by the side of the pool, grabbed a sarong and put it under my bottom and thought, 'oh, that hurt'," said Mrs Isaac, who put antiseptic cream on the bite.
But over the next week she developed fever-like symptoms, which quickly deteriorated. That was when she began to notice a red patch developing on her leg.
"I noticed there was a little sore bit, the size of a 5p coin, and it just got bigger and bigger and bigger, with blisters that were bursting around it. On the morning of July 16 I thought I was going to die," she said.
The friend whose home Mrs Isaac was staying at asked a nurse to look at the wound – they covered it in iodine and told her to go hospital.
Mrs Isaac was immediately transferred to intensive care, where doctors gave her a number of antibiotics intravenously, none of which were able to fight the infection, which grew until she had a 10-inch wound encircling her thigh.
"They had me on every antibiotic but nothing was working. There were 14 different bacteria – they didn't know what to treat me for next. The worry was that nothing worked.
"It looked like a 10-inch creme caramel on my leg," said Mrs Isaac, whose skin was dying from the poison in her leg. In the end, all doctors could do was operate to cut away the dead flesh.
Mrs Isaac said: "I asked if I was having an anaesthetic and he said there was no need. For 40 minutes he just cut away with a scalpel."
After 19 days in hospital, Mrs Isaac, who sold her Braintree hair salon in November 2011, spent the next four months going to the hospital every day to have the wound cleaned and dead flesh removed.
"You just have to be guided by people who know what they are doing," said Mrs Isaac, who missed her eldest daughter's 30th birthday, her youngest daughter's 21st birthday and her son's, 25th birthday due to her illness.
Despite not knowing what bit her, she and her family believe the likely culprit was a brown recluse spider, whose poison kills the flesh of those it bites.
"We still don't know to this day what it was," said Mrs Isaac, who is still suffering the effects. "My memory's terrible, my hair fell out and then I got shingles. Obviously your immune system has been completely shattered."
Mrs Isaac finally returned to the UK on February 5, seven months after flying to Spain for a six-week break.
Now she avoids spiders at all costs. "Now I kill them. I know you shouldn't kill God's creatures but this one nearly killed me."
