I had an interesting patient this last week: a lady I believe was bitten by a black widow spider.

There are lots of black widows around. There were many empty lots around the house where I grew up in Sparks, Nevada. I used to go through those lots turning over rocks, boards and other junk. Almost anything I turned over would have a big black widow spider under it.

There are plenty of black widows around here, too. We don’t see people bitten by them because they are very shy and only bite when forced to.

My patient was a lady about forty-years-old who came in with pain where she was bitten on her lower back. She also had the other symptoms of black widow spider envenomation: abdominal pain, chest pain and aches in all her muscles. She was really miserable. She was trembling and her heart was racing.

There is no specific treatment for black widow spider bites. My patient was given pain medicine and intravenous fluids. Laboratory tests were done to make sure there was not something else going on. When she was feeling better and her vital signs were normal, she was sent home.

The diagnosis of black widow envenomation is made when a patient has the right signs and symptoms and the offending spider is correctly identified. In this case, when they killed the spider, they destroyed the abdomen, which is where the hourglass-shaped red spot is found. The rest of it sure looked like a black widow to me and she had the signs and symptoms. As far as I know, this is only the second one I have seen in my thirty years of practicing emergency medicine.

My Dad asked me to make him a bag for the coiled-up cable he uses to connect his RV to the electrical outlet. Here he is with the custom-made bag, ready for their next trip.

In medical school, they teach you about diseases. They teach you who is most likely to get a certain illness. You have to learn what kind of symptoms a person with that condition might have and what is found when examining such a patient. You learn how to put all of that together to make a diagnosis.

When evaluating a patient, the first thing we do is take a history. In appendicitis, we look for a classic story of vague discomfort around the belly button that, over the next few hours, settles into the right lower abdomen. Classic other symptoms are nausea, vomiting and fever. Most people with appendicitis don’t have diarrhea.

Next comes the physical exam. In this case, how does the patient look generally? Does he look sick? Is he tender in just the right place? Is there nothing else that would lead you to think this was something other than appendicitis?

Next come lab tests. The urinalysis should be normal and the white blood count should be elevated.

If there is any question, the last step is a CT scan of the abdomen, which is the test now used to establish the diagnosis. Why not just scan everyone? It is time-consuming, expensive and exposes the patient to a lot of radiation. So, the history, physical examination and laboratory results help us decide who is most likely to benefit from a scan.

I recently had a young man come in who hadn’t gotten the memo on appendicitis. He had left abdominal pain that started in his flank and went up to his upper abdomen. He had abdominal tenderness but not where his appendix is expected to be. His blood count was normal. His pain was gone after some medicine. He was smiling and happy as he thanked me on his way out the door.

The next night, he came back in, sicker. His white blood cell count was very high and he was really tender all over his abdomen. His CAT scan showed appendicitis. I called a surgeon to admit him to get his appendix taken out.

By the time one has been doing this for as long as I have, it is expected that common diseases will present weirdly. Still, this is an unbelievably atypical presentation of a common disease. It is a good example of how challenging and frustrating my job can be.