I'm not especially excited about sharing this experience, but when I was searching for information at a critical moment, I had a hard time finding anything very useful. I found page after page of corporate-owned, pharmaceutical-sponsored boilerplate that looked like they were all copied from each other. Some real life stories about the effects, treatment, and aftermath of black widow bites would have been helpful. I was aware that being bitten by a black widow is almost never fatal, but I would like to have had more details on what to expect.
According to various reports, between 2000-3000 people are bitten by black widows in the United States each year, so why is it so hard to find first person accounts? Probably due to search engines giving too much weight to "official" websites, but the more accounts that are published, the more they will show up in searches.
Keep in mind--of course--that I'm not a healthcare professional of any kind. This is an account of actual events as clearly as I can remember them, not medical advice.
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