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CEDARVIEW -- A Utah woman has suffered an ordeal over the last year, and it's all because of a spider bite--at least that's what she believes. Some doctors agree; others are skeptical.
Keli Nielsen is an athletic, active mom who didn't see it coming. A spider may have changed her life.
"It's been a total nightmare. It's horrible," Nielsen says. "[I] took my sweats down, and there it was on my leg. I didn't think anything of it at the time."
She says it looked like a brown recluse spider. She felt no bite and killed it. But within days, a blemish turned into a blister and then an open wound; her skin was dying.
Almost a year later the wound is still there, healing ever so slowly.
"Just to walk is really painful, all the time. It never eases up," Nielsen says.
She lives in a rural area called Cedarview. Brown recluse spiders are not known to live there or anywhere in Utah. Their habitat is the southeastern states.
Doctors were skeptical at first and treated Nielsen with surgery as if it was a skin disease. Now Dr. Rodney Anderson believes it actually was a spider bite.
"Wouldn't bet the farm on it, but I'd bet the car on it," Anderson says.
If it was a brown recluse spider, how did it get to Cedarview? Nielsen thinks it came in a load of construction supplies her husband's company shipped in from out of state.
"In truth, there are a lot of other things that can present looking like spider bites," says Dr. John Zone, chairman of the University of Utah Department of Dermatology.
Zone has never seen Nielsen as a patient; but as chief of dermatology at the University of Utah, he's examined many patients who blame their dying, necrotic skin on spiders. The same symptoms can be triggered by causes ranging from inflamed fat to flesh-eating bacteria.
"However, there is a lot of folklore. A lot of people want to attribute what a lot of things happened to them to a spider bite, when, in truth, there's actually another explanation," Zone says.
Nielsen believes skeptical doctors mistreated her at first. When more than a dozen other wounds started to open up on her arm and elsewhere, she concluded that spider venom had spread throughout her body.
"It's a described phenomenon in the medical literature. They talk about satellite lesions from the brown recluse spider bite, but it's a rare occurrence," Anderson says.
But Zone isn't so sure he agrees.
"A bite on the leg being responsible for a subsequent lesion on the arm, or some such thing, is extremely unlikely," Zone says.
There's similar controversy about an agonizing treatment Nielsen found on the Internet: weekly electric jolts from a Taser stun-gun. She believes it's helping her heal.
"[It] doesn't help with the pain," she says. "It actually makes it kind of worse."
E-mail: jhollenhorst@ksl.com
