MUM'S NIGHTMARE A REDBACK RUINED MY LIFE

When Jenna was bitten by a spider, she wasn't expecting years of pain

- Lisa Brookman

Rifling through the shoebox on my back deck, I pulled out my steelcap boots.

It was November 2014 and, as a volunteer for the Donald Country Fire Authority in Victoria, I was gearing up to head out and sandbag properties to help protect them from raging  floodwaters.

Suddenly, I felt a stinging sensation on my left forearm, and I spotted a tiny black speck crawling up it.

Must be a bug, I thought, brushing it off.

But as my arm began to pulse with pain, a strange sickly feeling took hold of my entire body.

Glancing down at my forearm, I gasped seeing a long, red raised bump tracked up it. Minutes later, my head was throbbing and I felt stabbing pains in my stomach.

As goosebumps spread over my arm, my heart sank.

Something is very wrong, I realised.

Calling out to my dad, Leo, I told him I’d been bitten by something.

Checking the back deck again, I noticed a tiny redback spider, half the size of a  ve cent piece.

I knew the small creatures were highly venomous and their bites could be fatal.

‘We’d better get you to the hospital. You don’t look well,’ Dad worried.

Thankfully, the road wasn’t cut off by the  floods. But our local hospital didn’t have the antivenom I needed, so I was taken an hour away to another hospital.

There, doctors administered two doses of antivenom and rushed me to ICU where they dressed the angry red wound that had formed on my arm.