A man has had his leg amputated after being bitten by a false widow spider.
Forty-six-year old Andy Perry is believed to be the first British person to lose a leg due to a spider bite.
The dad-of-two was working as a landscaper when he began to suffer with severe back pain. He had no idea he had been bitten by a spider until he was rushed to hospital with sepsis and kidney failure.
Over the next few weeks the infection was cleared but Andy was left with lymphedema - a painful and debilitating swelling of the leg, which left his skin falling off.
He says the pain was so bad that he even considered cutting his own leg off.
"I was doing a quote for a job in 2015 and I was coming home at lunchtime to look after the kids because my wife was on shift," Andy said. "But within a couple of hours I started feeling really poorly.
"I rang the missus to see if she could come home but she couldn't and the next I know I got a massive ache in the small of my back.
"I went to bed when she got back, pretty much for the whole weekend and I was throwing up.
"Then on the Sunday morning it was a question of having to get over to the hospital as soon as I could.
"I was seen by a doctor in the Royal Leicester Infirmary Triage and he said there was no chance of me going home.
"Then he (the doctor) admitted me straight away, the ache in my back was the kidney's packing up from the infection and sepsis. I put on a IV anti-biotic and almost died because of the sepsis."
Medics believed it was caused by a false widow spider bite after the medical expert doing a blood test spotted the puncture marks on Andy's leg.
Andy continued: "He said it looks like a spider bite. They then got the doctor in charge to have look and that's what they came to agreement on.
"They came to a conclusion it was a false widow spider because it has a reputation of biting people.
"The only thing we can think of is that I literally just brushed past it and it has had a quick bite as I've gone past. Apparently the bite of the false widow feels like a bee sting but I didn't feel a thing.
"The spiders are an awful lot more common than people think. After they sorted out the kidney function, things started improving and the sepsis was beaten by the anti-biotics.
"I've had the district nurses coming around for the next three months changing the dressing on my leg every day. The lymphedema caused the leg to swell to the point where the skin split and fell off.
"That was all just a massive open weeping sores and blisters and just generally horribleness. And that was it, the leg was all but useless from that point, I spent a certain amount of time trying to get treatment.
"There just wasn't a surgeon nearby who wanted to touch it because of the lymphedema as it was a live infection.
"So without getting any treatment I just couldn't work - so I figured I would go down the route of elective amputation in a last desperate attempt to get back to work. But again, trying to find a doctor or surgeon to look at the amputation was hard.
"Eventually I had to threaten my GP with cutting my own leg off with a blade from a chainsaw because I was getting so desperate.
"Out of that I tried a guy in Coventry who climbed on board straight away as soon as he saw the leg.
"I spent 20 minutes talking to him, needed a second opinion and spoke to prosthetic people and as soon as that was done it was all agreed.
"The leg was cut off on March 13 of this year, it should've been healed by now but I got a secondary infection so I was back in surgery on April 27.
"The plan is to rehabilitate the leg, get a prosthetic and get back to work for this year or next.
"I had been a landscaper for about five years prior to the bite and I had a good business going on but now it's all gone.
"We've been living off my wife's salary - I have got zero income because of this bite."
Andy is now raising funds to make his garden wheel-chair friendly so he can spend time outdoors with his two sons.
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You can donate on Andy's JustGiving page here.
Topics: UK News