Brise Nannie said:
we later found out there are spiders that are very dangerous one being the Brown Recluse. He saw a doctor and had to take meds. Better to be safe.
The OP is in Maine which is not where brown recluse live.
See:
http://www.washington.edu/burkemuseum/spidermyth/myths/brownrecluse.html
More myths about the brown recluse from the AMA:
More than 2,000 brown recluse bites are reported to poison control centers each year. And, if epidemiology and confirmed cases are any indication, most of them are something else.
"Doctors are horrible [about] misdiagnosing any kind of necrotic-looking wounds as brown recluse bites," says Sean P. Bush, MD, a professor of emergency medicine at Loma Linda School of Medicine. An envenomation specialist, he has become the "go-to doctor" in Southern California for suspected spider bites.
In the emergency department "you see a necrotic wound every other shift," he says, but spider bites are a rarity. Even with black widows, which "are totally ubiquitous here," he only sees about half a dozen bites a year. "If it's an 'exciting year,' maybe 10."
And Dr. Bush doesn't see any brown recluse bites.
Media attention and public dread have made loxoscelism what Dr. Stoecker calls a "disease du jour," and many patients are convinced they have it.
"They get very angry and upset" if contradicted, says Dr. Osterhoudt. Many Web sites, he adds, tell of patients' "recurrent diseases brought on by brown recluse," and how "doctors just won't believe them."
This is exacerbated by poison control data, as centers are dependent on the information provided by callers.
Few patients present with a spider, though. Even a stomped-on specimen has diagnostic value, since specialists rely on the sclerotized genitalia, eye arrangement, and hard-to-squish features like leg spination (absent in Loxosceles), not the highly variable markings, to make their ID.
The paucity of authoritatively confirmed cases has plagued the literature. Researchers have had to use tiny samples and/or rely on presumed or probable cases. This leaves clinicians with a composite picture drawn in part from erroneous best guesses.
With no readily available test, most diagnoses -- and misdiagnoses -- are based on the general look of the wound.
"The most common thing I see misdiagnosed is just a common cellulitis," says Dr. Bush. "In the center of the wound there will be a little necrosis."
Dr. Stoecker, a dermatologist at the University of Missouri Health Sciences Center in Columbia -- the heart of brown recluse country -- offers some rules of thumb: "If you have a big bite, not irregular, no spread -- forget it."
That is more likely a bacterial infection, he says; or pyoderma gangrenosum: "It's big, it's wet. These things ulcerate early. Within three days, you can put a probe 10 cm into the wound." The lesion from a brown recluse bite is usually dry and not as extensive.
