A Kansas mother of four spent a month in the hospital and was warned she may have only days to live after a spider bite during a family camping trip triggered a life-threatening medical crisis.
Britagne Miller was spending the evening around a campfire with her family at Cheney Lake, a popular destination for families, when several arachnids bit her on May 28.
At first, the bites did not appear serious. But within four days, Miller said a painful bruise had developed on her calf and quickly grew worse.
‘This one kept swelling and swelling, and it was like a fire stir that’s metal,’ she said. ‘It was like shooting down my leg into my foot, and it felt like I was being stabbed.’
By June 4, the pain had become so intense that Miller was admitted to the hospital. Doctors later discovered that the bite had caused multiple blood clots in her leg.
Miller, who has two blood-clotting disorders, underwent surgery to remove the clots, and doctors placed a drain in the wound. The situation deteriorated further when the drain became infected.
The infection became so serious that Miller developed sepsis. She was told she was at risk of liver failure and that she might have just three days to live.
‘They couldn’t keep my levels above even critical,’ Miller told KAKE News. ‘They gave me three days up to a month to live, so that was scary.’
Britagne Miller, a mother of four in Kansas, was told she had just three days to live after suffering complications from a spider bite
Thousands of Americans are bitten by spiders every year, which are mostly harmless and cause slight pain or redness.
It was not clear which species bit Miller, but experts said it may have been the brown recluse spider, which is common in the South and Midwest and tends to hide in piles of wood and leaf litter.
It is considered one of America’s two most dangerous, the other being the black widow, because its bite contains venom that causes skin cell death and necrosis, potentially triggering a bacterial infection.
Miller said her wound became infected with staph and gram-negative bacteria, which are commonly linked to hospitalization.
These bacteria can also live harmlessly on the skin but enter the bloodstream via open wounds.
She had also progressed to end-stage liver failure and developed sepsis, an overreaction to an infection that causes the immune system to attack healthy tissues and organs.
The combination, doctors warned, left her on borrowed time due to the risks of organ failure and a compromised immune system.
And after two weeks in the hospital, Miller’s husband, Jake, said on the family’s GoFundMe page, which was set up to raise $10,000 to help with medical costs, that doctors offered to place her on hospice care.
Experts say the brown recluse spider may have been behind Miller’s infected bite
Miller with her four children. She is awaiting a liver transplant after spending weeks in hospital
After nearly a month in the intensive care unit and home care, undergoing multiple procedures to repair damage from the skin around her stitches becoming necrotic, Miller was able to go home in late July.
Doctors said they are still unsure exactly what kind of spider caused the ordeal, but they speculate it may have been a brown recluse.
Miller is one of the 10,000 Americans awaiting a liver transplant to address her end-stage organ failure now that her other conditions are beginning to stabilize.
On average, it takes about three to eight months to receive a liver from the transplant list, with treatments like dialysis used to clear waste out of the blood in the interim.
Dr Raymond Cloyd, a horticultural entomologist at Kansas State University, said that early evidence suggested it could be a brown recluse spider bite, based on the bite’s location and infection.
He told KAKE News: ‘The two venomous ones that we have in Kansas are the black widow spider, and the more numerous one is the brown recluse spider, which prevails throughout most of the Midwest to mid-central Kansas.’
