I see a lot of disturbed people in the course of doing my job. We had a patient last month who had purportedly sprayed himself with pesticide in an effort to kill what he believed was an infestation of microscopic spiders. Now there are all kinds of mites that live on people, and there are pesticides made for this, but he was using your garden variety stuff, and he had no mites. What he did have was kidney failure, and his liver was going south as well. We admitted him, gave him IV fluids and antibiotics, and he started to feel better. That's when he began telling me his story.
He said all of his symptoms were caused by tiny spiders.
He told me the spiders colonized him when he had a medical procedure, a minor hemorrhoid surgery. He began itching after that, and decided that the "mothership" of spiders had been placed in his anus. (I would never make that up. The doctors even noted it in his chart.) As time passed he got weaker and weaker. He tried many things to kill the spiders, but nothing worked. He began crawling around his house, because he could not stand up without passing out. Finally his sister came and got him, laid him in her car, and dropped him off at the ER. It's a good thing.
I gave him exercises to do in bed, and tried to get him up daily, even raising the head of the bed inch by inch but he would panic at 45 degrees and demand to be put back to horizontal. Eventually his labs improved and his heart function normalized and they moved him off the telemetry unit where I work. I heard from a colleague on the med-surg unit a few days later that he had finally gotten up and walked to the shower with assist. I stopped in to say hello and congratulate him on his progress. He looked much better, pink where he had been yellow before. He said he was bored and was looking forward to going home. He complained about having heartburn, and asked if he could have something for it. I said I would ask his nurse, and made a joke about the hospital food. "No," he said, "I don't think it's the food....Do you have any pesticide?"
