Bitten

Yeah, I thought that the show was awesome AWESOME until the last segment, and since then I have become a paranoid freak. Even more than the time I washed a spider down the drain.

What show? "I Was Bitten" on the Discovery Channel. The premise? Real stories with DRAMATIZATIONS (of course, they were fake, but these moments were the most traumatizing parts of the whole damn show) of their ordeals after having been bitten/stung/etc. by some of the deadliest creatures on the planet.

I caught an episode about halfway through, so I have no idea of the horrors I missed, but I did get to see a guy explain what happened when he stumbled upon a nest of killer bees. While it was unpleasant to hear his doctor talk about the number of stingers that were removed from his body in the ER (over one thousand), it was nothing compared to the victim of the last story.

This guy - this poor, poor bastard - was bitten by a brown recluse in his sleep because his bitch of a wife had stolen all of the covers and he grabbed a blanket from the floor. He had no idea that the little pin prick he felt was a spider bite, so even though he found a large welt on his leg upon waking, he didn't think much of it and went to work.

Well APPARENTLY, the venom of a brown recluse relies on gravity to do its worst, and by the end of the episode, this guy had a circle of dead tissue removed from his leg. How much? A diameter of TWELVE INCHES. It was horrifying. Even scarier was the fact that this couple had been killing at least one recluse a day in their apartment, not realizing what they were nor that their apartment was completely infested with the BROWN RECLUSE SPIDERS.

What. The. Shit.

And now? I am freaking myself out thinking that there are poisonous spiders everywhere. I flip back my covers before getting into bed, I clap my slippers together before putting them on, and I am seriously considering removing the dust ruffle from my bed so that nothing crawly has easy access.

Thanks, SHOW.