Sunday Blog 192 – 6th July 2025
This will be my last spider bite blog, I promise. For those of you who may need closure, my spider bite wound is healing very well and I’ve eventually settled into the community nursing service after my bumpy start. Perhaps next week will be the end of the need for wound dressing at all.
I’m taking a moment to rejoice in the reduced pain and increased healing, AND I’m reflecting on how little I knew before this misadventure befell me.
As someone who’s been a health advocate for more than quarter of a century, speaks fluent health acronyms, here are the things I didn’t know about managing a small traumatic wound on the back of my thigh:
- For the walking wounded, no services or clinics will be open until morning, so if possible, stay home until about 7 or 8am, and hobble into the Emergency Department then. It may save you a lost night’s sleep in the hectic hurly burly of emergency.
- Intravenous antibiotics are not a “one and done” situation. It will require you being attached to some kind of drip for at least four to five days.
- The catheter they put in the back of your hand to administer drugs and take blood samples etc. has to be changed every 72 hours. But they can put a line in your arm that can stay for about 28 days. This could be what they call a PICC line which goes all the way to your heart, or in my case, a central line which just around the bicep area. Luckily for me.
- Should your wound need cleaning, you will need to undergo a general anaesthetic, even if it seems a lot, it is necessary to manage the pain of that procedure.
- Once that is done, you will have an open wound that needs to heal from the bottom up. What that means is that each day gauze will have to be poked into the wound. That’s after the old gauze from the day before has been removed. It will hurt but not for long.
- So you’ll still have around 14-21 days of healing ahead after surgery, if everything is going your way, i.e. you are well, don’t have diabetes, manage to avoid further infection etc etc.
- You will get better then get worse then get better then get worse over and over. It’s a jagged line, but it trends upwards (if you’re lucky.)
While I was given leaflets and leaflets and leaflets – outlining my rights as a patient, how to avoid falls, how to eat well (including a giant food pyramid image), information on smoking cessation, exercise and on and on, none of it gave me the information above that I needed. About what to expect from my body and from the likely trajectory of treatment and healing of a spider bite.
And here is the question I’ve been sitting with. Why are we always chided to be more empowered as patients, but we’re forced to bumble about in an information soup, which overwhelms but doesn’t inform or empower? Why is there such an information asymmetry between patients and the people who care for them? And why oh why has it taken me 25+ years to really see this issue?
Yours, really wanting to know.