WARNING: CONTAINS DISTRESSING IMAGES OF INJURY
A Brit has revealed the horrific injuries he suffered after he was bitten by a spider in Cambodia, leaving him stranded there.
Andrew Hodges, 56, was three weeks into a working holiday in the South-East Asian country, when the creature got him in the middle of the night.
His leg swelled up to twice its normal size and he began to hallucinate, before collapsing. When he came to, he was in hospital, where doctors had initially wanted to amputate the offending limb.
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Although the bite happened back in 2018, it caused such issues with his health that he was left able to return home. Now he is well enough, he still can't travel due to the pandemic.
Andrew, from Woking, Surrey, said: ''I suspect it was a spider bite although I have no recollection of it happening.
''I was acting very strange according to a next door neighbour, and my knee on my right leg was apparently twice the size.
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''It wasn't until I collapsed in the street when a passer by found me and offered to take me to hospital. I was left on a trolley with no medicine.
''I later received two drips and was laid on a mat on the floor to receive treatment, which is where I became conscious again.
"I was given one injection a day, and after the fourth day, I was informed they were going to cut my leg off. I wasn't very happy with that idea, especially as I had no information of what happened or anything else."
He escaped the hospital in the early hours of the morning.
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He said: "I got a tuk-tuk, got back to the apartment I was renting, and basically had to treat myself."
Andrew got hold of some antibiotics and was finally brought back to health.
He said: "It took about eight months for it to heal, even though it's not healed now, the bottom part of the ankle, because the leg exploded in three places - one under the knee, one on the bite, one on the bone of the ankle.''
Andrew's savings have been flushed away from paying for eight months' worth of medicine.
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He is also in debt from not paying his £200 a month visa due to not being able to walk to immigration.
"I'm stranded anyway because you can't get out of the country because of lockdown," he said.
"Even if I could fly, the main reason is the total costs here from what I paid in medical bills and eight months of medicines, all the money I had saved up slowly has drained away."
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He added: ''The spider bite destroyed my whole life as I knew it and now I am reduced to poverty and will soon be on the streets of Cambodia.''
Andrew is hoping his brothers or other family in Woking will get in touch to help him.
Featured Image Credit: SWNSTopics: Spider, World News, travel, Health