A 58-year-old Michigan woman succumbed to what has been called a "rare death' after being bit by a brown recluse spider.
Betty Ann Strickland came from her job as a nurse on June 30 and showed her husband, Charles, a bug bite on her foot. The couple lived on a property with horses in Tustin, east of the Manistee National Forest, CBS Detroit reported.
"I looked at it, and it didn't look usual at the time. I mean, we have black flies and things like that here, so it didn't look unusual. It wasn't swollen excessively, there was not a lot of redness," Charles told CBS.
Two days later the woman started showing signs of a serious health complication.
"I asked her to go to the doctor and well, you'd have to know my wife, but she's a nurse and going to the doctor just wasn't something she was into," he said. "She told me she'd be ok, she just needed to rest for a while."
By Thursday morning Charles convinced his wife to go to the doctor. As he was helping her down the stairs she complained of foot pain, and the bite had swelled to about the size of a marble. After his wife said she had trouble breathing Charles called 911 and his daughter who lives nearby.
"While I'm talking to the lady, I'm talking to my wife, trying to figure out what's going on, and my wife couldn't talk. Her eyes were fixed straight ahead and she just couldn't, she was gasping for air but she couldn't get any air, is what it looked like," he said.
Just as the couple's daughter arrived Betty Ann Strickland lost consciousness and stopped breathing. The family attempted to perform CPR for 40 minutes as they waited for an ambulance; paramedics continued to perform it for about 30 minutes after that, but the woman passed away.
"Just within a short period of time, a matter of minutes, he got a response back and they told him that it was a recluse, a brown recluse spider bite," Charles said.
Brown recluse spider bites don't always hurt right away, WebMD reported. Symptoms can include reddened skin, mild to intense pain and itching, and an open sore. More severe symptoms include Fever, nausea, and joint pain.
