A 9-year-old girl merely thought that her nightgown tag had pinched her while she was changing her clothes. "Around 7 a.m., she was removing her nightgown and felt a little poke in her arm, near her armpit area," Jessica Calvillo said of her daughter, Adalynn McDowell. "She said she wanted to donate the nightgowns because it had a tag in it that was poking her."
So the two of them went about their morning, thinking nothing much of it. Adalynn went to school and all was fine — until her symptoms started around noon.
Jessica learned that her daughter was having pain in her arm, due to the spider bite that they were unaware of at the time. "She said it felt like lightning shot in her armpit and then she had fever chills. Her skin was pale and clammy and her lips were purple and she was just shivering. She couldn't stop shaking and she was kind of hunched over."
She took her daughter to the ER, but was quickly brushed off by the nurse practitioners. "I explained to them all of her symptoms and what had happened and that I suspected the poke on her arm was actually a spider bite because the brown recluse spider is very common in the area we live in. I had explained that to the nurse practitioners who barely glanced at my daughter's arm before saying, 'Oh no, that's not a bite, it's just a pinch.'"
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After going to another emergency room, the mom and daughter were again sent home by doctors saying they had nothing to worry about.
But Adalynn's symptoms worsened. Within hours of returning to the hospital, doctors confirmed the girl had been bitten by a brown recluse spider. She was transferred to a children's hospital two hours away and was there for six days. "What gave me the strength to kind of get through this and be that strong person from my daughter was prayer," Jessica said. Her daughter is now back to being healthy after recovering.
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