A heroin user deliberately injected herself with a ground-up black widow spider in an attempt to get high. The 37-year-old woman from California, went to hospital in pain and told doctors that she had mixed the remains of the spider with distilled water and then injected it intravenously.
Her symptoms at the hospital’s A&E included severe cramps and muscle pain mainly in her upper body. She also claimed to have a headache, felt anxious while her pulse rate was elevated and she was breathing quickly. It is believed to be one of the few cases where a patient has deliberately been bitten by a black widow spider as usually it happens when the spiders are inadvertently disturbed in their webs.
The case was recorded for research purposes in the Annals of Emergency Medicine and she denied that she had taken the black widow poison in an attempt to commit suicide. Black widow venom is 15 times more powerful than that of a rattlesnake which makes them so dangerous but they would normally only use their poison when they feel threatened. And this case is clearly unusual where she will have received the bite after the spider was ground up and it is possible that she got a higher dosage as a result than normal.
The unnamed woman was put in intensive care with her difficulty breathing became severe and it is thought that as she already had asthma, this may have worsened her symptoms. A black widow’s venom has the effect of disrupting the signals in the nervous system leading to muscle pains and other symptoms that the woman had including the rapid pulse. Doctors attempting to treat her first gave her medication to ease the muscle cramps and then morphine for pain relief.
