By RAY WYCHE

They are less than an inch in size but their bites pack a powerful punch.

At least two Whiteville residents can testify that the pain and misery caused by the venom of the brown recluse spider are far out of proportion to its size.

The recluse spider is non-aggressive. The breed lives all around us but their habit of staying in dark places and avoiding activity usually makes their presence unobserved.

Recluse venom has little effect on some people; reactions to some recluse bites are no more severe than a mosquito bite, experts say. But it can be otherwise.

“If I had waited another month, I would have lost my foot,” says Michael Memory who took five hits from recluse fangs in the summer of 2004. Memory says the effects of the encounter are with him still.

Whiteville resident Beth Robinson, the target of a recluse bite in July of last year, says she has “a cute little scar” on her knee and the memory of a long period of suffering to show just what a recluse fang can do.

Robin Gilmore, manager of the emergency department at Columbus Regional Healthcare System, says the number of recluse bites treated at the hospital thus far this summer “is about normal. A lot of times, people think they have been bitten by a spider if they get an abscess, but it’s not always a spider.”

Many recluse victims, if their symptoms become severe enough, are treated by their family physician and do not go to the emergency room, making an accurate count of the number of bites requiring medical attention difficult to determine. Stings of other insects can easily be confused with bites of recluse spiders.

Memory has a reminder of how serious recluse bites can be.

“I still don’t have any feeling in that foot,” he says of his bites two years ago.

Robinson knew that something had stung her knee on July 5 of last year. She was straightening up things in her carport that had been treated for spiders that day. “I never saw a spider. I thought I had a wasp bite,” she said.

Memory was working in the flower beds in his yard, dressed in shorts and barefooted since it was a hot summer day.

It was when he stepped onto the pine straw mulch around a tree that he felt a mild sting on his left foot. There was no severe, sudden pain.

“It felt like I had stepped on a pine cone,” Memory says.

The mild sting that felt like the pin pricks of a pine cone’s scales was the bite of a (or rather, the bites of five) brown recluse spiders, sometimes called fiddle back spiders for the violin-shaped markings on their backs.

The venomous spiders are fittingly named; they prefer dark, quiet places and hunt their insect prey mostly at night or in dark locations. Despite the damage they can do with their potent venom that they inject with sharp fangs, recluses generally do not bite unless stepped on or handled roughly. Their brownish color and small size—they range from 1/4 to 3/4 inch in length—along with their avoidance of light and disturbances, enable them to live out of sight of most humans.

Even though at first he felt only a slight sting when he stepped on what apparently was a newly hatched batch of recluses in the pine straw, Memory’s real problems began 24 hours later when he noticed red streaks running up his leg and an increase in pain.

“But it didn’t appear to be serious,” he says.

But soon the skin began to shed off two of his toes and the ball of his foot. He began treatment at a local physician’s office “but it didn’t seem to heal,” Memory says.

He was sent to a medical facility in Myrtle Beach specializing in hard-to-heal wounds.

“They lanced it and gave me a powerful antibiotic,” Memory says, but healing was slow.

“It (the treatment) went on for nine months. I went every week,” he says.

The exterminator’s spraying of Robinson’s carport evidently disturbed the shy recluse spider.

“I had on long pants and when I bent down I must have crushed him against my right knee,” she says.

“I’m being treated for lung cancer with chemo(therapy) and I was slightly nauseated. My knee hurt but I was not in a lot of pain.”

Robinson did not see a doctor right away, even though the site of the sting became swollen and inflamed. The pain and nausea increased each day.

“I blamed everything on the chemo. I had had chemo the day before and I had taken anti-nausea medicine. I felt like I had a horrible, horrible case of the flu. I felt so bad I could not talk to people. It was two or three weeks before I got any treatment.”

The severity of the bite was noted at her next chemotherapy session.

“I wore a skirt and had a bandage on the bite. The doctor looked at it and said I could not have therapy. He sent me to a surgeon immediately.”

Necrosis—the dying of tissue—had set in at the site of sting and the tell-tale “volcano,” the cone-shaped hole in the flesh, was evident.

After deadening the area around the bite, the surgeon applied suction to the wound to remove the decayed tissue.

“Forty-eight hours after the suction, I felt really good, but it took two or three weeks to heal,” Robinson says.

Lengthy periods of healing are the standard for recluse spider bites, although in some cases early use of antibiotics can be successful. The bites of recluse spiders present problems in diagnosing; the symptoms often mimic those of an infected wasp or bee sting.

Kim Smith, director of the Columbus County Health Department, said, “If you discover it soon enough, you can treat it with antibiotics.”

People react differently to recluse bites; some, like Robinson and Memory, have prolonged periods of recovery. Others have few or no problems. Of bite victims who come into the emergency room, “some go home and some go to surgery,” Gilmore says.

Since recluses like dark, quiet places, experts say be extremely careful around such locations. Attics seem to be particularly attractive to the spider; the experts advise turning on lights, making noises and vibrations, then leave the attic for a few minutes to allow the recluses time to move.

Such actions will usually send the spiders and their potentially highly dangerous venom into hiding.