Black widow bites

I narrowly avoided two today. Seems they are quite abundant this year in NC.

Question in regards to AF. What would be the potential effect in an AF patient (even former)? What treatment should one seek, if any? Normally I'd just ignore it and deal with the pain, but I haven't had the pleasure of being bitten since AF. And we are up to our eyeballs in the things it would seem. I hate to say it, but I'm rooting for the wasps!

Hi Wolfpack,

Avoidance is the best policy, obviously, and there is no rule of thumb on what might happen, or might not, relative to AFIB triggering with a Black Widow bite that I know of. A solid ablation might well prevent any cardiac impact, but this likely depends on your sensitivity to BW toxin, the dose you got and a myriad of other combinations of variabilities that can be involved in any one person's unique experience with such a known-to-be-toxic critter.

Usually, it is a transient strong cramping and abdominal pain issue with adults bitten by a BW ... we have tons of them here in northern Arizona mountains, especially in late summer through fall, and some really big ones all around our house and occasionally within the house ... not to mention scorpions, rattlesnakes, coyotes rumbling through our large back yard filled with natural growth forest trees with a small creek running through our property in a somewhat riparian terrain. Consequences can be much more severe though so dont mess around if any significant symptoms begin as the sooner treated the better. If this is a big risk in your area, then it might be smart to confirm in advance which good close by ER is fully set up to deal with these bites.

We also get Bobcats occasionally and daily visits from packs of javelinas who make our yard a second home, as well as full buck deer (the last a buck I saw some months ago now was a 12 point buck staring at me across an open space about 20 yards away in our back yard from my office french doors).

The most exciting .. and a bit concerting .. very recent sighting by both my immediate next door neighbor and our neighbor across the street was a full grown Mountain lion mother with a single cub that both neighbors spotted not long after dawn two months ago as she and her cub came out from the shrubs in OUR backyard and walked right past our side porch and directly beneath our bedroom window on there way back into the mountains!!

I have seen their large foot prints before here, but never an actual sighing reported in our own yard until now. Last summer, perhaps the same Mountain lion or another female this time with two cubs, was seen walking down the street that runs right in front of our house and this sighting was widely reported in the local newspapers as apparently she has killed a large deer on a nearby golf course links during the prior night, (our house is just two to three blocks away from wild mountain trails as part of a national forest, and there have been over 29 sightings of mountain lions within the Sedona city limits the last couple of years).

Needless to say, when I go out in the backyard for a little star gazing at night now, Im certainly a good bit more on alert than I had been prior to this close up sightings. Anyway, I digress, and enough about some of our 'Wild Kingdom' experiences here in this beautiful rugged part of the country.

It goes without saying though Wolfpack that should you have any notable symptoms from a BW bite, it makes good sense to get thee to an urgent care center soon rather out of an abundance of caution and being safe rather than sorry, even though BW bite outcomes in adults are typically more on the transiently though often severely painful side of the coin with at times severe cramping, sweating and at times nausea plus elevated BP and HR being possible so this is where any remaining open AFIB or flutter triggers could become involved... there are on occasion more serious repercussions possible too, even possibly fatal, though that is very rare in adults.
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Best of luck in avoiding getting a BW bite in the first place.

Shannon