The first two itchy bites on my left arm appeared benign enough - just mosquitoes, I thought. Some very hot Sydney summer nights, no flyscreens on my doors - it was the obvious conclusion.
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It took days before the thought of a spider crawling through my bed entered my head.
Three weeks and seven bites later - including two on my face, and an eye that nearly closed over, I finally cracked. I slept on the couch the night before the pest man arrived.
The delay seems stupid in hindsight, but the first two bites progressed slowly. After two days, the redness had spread, the swelling began, and, as I sat at my desk applying more Stingose, my boss caught a glimpse of my arm and asked, horrified, what I had done.
"I've been bitten by something that I suppose I'm allergic to," I said, as I swallowed another antihistamine.
The retail assistant at the chemist jumped backwards when she looked at my swollen arm, and agreed it was probably best I spoke to the pharmacist. He sold me more antihistamines and some steroid cream to help the swelling.
A Google image search for "spider bites" indicated my suspicion might be right. Just what kind of spider was debatable.
Like most people, I had heard only horrific stories of white tail spider bites: my parents' late neighbour, a retired surgeon, had to have his legs amputated for issues allegedly stemming from a white tail bite, so I assumed my bites couldn't be that, even with Google's results.
Then came the image of the spider crawling across my computer screen on The Sydney Morning Herald 's homepage. For some it induced reactions of fear, but it was the best timed story on white tails I could have wished for. The story debunked some myths of the feared arachnid, and pointed out they love to sleep in bedrooms in hot weather. The next day there was a compilation of people's stories of white tail spider bites.
My two now-fading bites were classic reactions. I'd upgraded from a theory of which I was sceptical to certainty that I'd survived two white tail spider bites relatively unscathed.
But any triumphant feelings disappeared when the third bite turned up a week later - again I wrote it off as a mozzie at first. Surely I couldn't be that unlucky?
As that bite also started to grow and swell, I bought an insect bomb from the supermarket and set it off, arguably a week later than most smart people would have done.
Bingo - under my bed I found one dead little white tail spider.
"I got him!!" I proclaimed to all the "are you sure it's not bed bugs?" sceptics (I was certain - I'd shared hostel bunks with bed bugs twice before, so I knew exactly how I reacted to those).
The subsequent sweet dreams turned to nightmares a week later when two bites turned up on my face and another two on my right arm.
Again, I thought mosquitoes, or maybe even a pimple? Denial is comfortable when you are faced with the thought of a spider crawling on your face in your sleep. I bombed the room again - no dead spiders.
As the bites swelled and my eyelid puffed over my eye, I called the real estate agent. Pest control is a tenant's responsibility, they said, but call this guy - he'll give you a good rate, they said.
I was surprised when the pest man was sceptical of my self-diagnosis. "Wouldn't be a white tail," he said. I became sceptical of his experience as a pest controller.
I showed him the photo of the dead little white tail spider I'd bombed myself. "Is that actually a white tail?" he asked. I pulled up Chloe Booker's explainer, and the scientific diagram in it finally convinced him.
"I need to go home and do some Googling," he conceded.
With my apartment treated for spiders and cockroaches - as well as bed bugs for good measure - I have just a few small scars left on my arms from the bites, including where the first bite occurred six weeks ago.
Thankfully no mental scars stuck around - I'm sleeping easy again, although I did throw away my pillows after one particular nightmare.
