Urgent Warning: That "Bite" May Be Potentially Deadly MRSA

Recently, our 12-year-old granddaughter, Aspen, and her 9-year-old sister, Autumn, came to our house for a visit. Aspen had a few mosquito bites on her legs, but I thought little of it, as she loves the outdoors and seldom bothers to protect herself with repellant. Most bites make really bad-looking places on her skin, but they usually heal up with no problem.

That was the case with most of these bites, but one on her left shin only looked worse as the days went by. We had picked the girls up on Wednesday, and by Saturday, in spite of my doing all the things I would normally do for insect bites, and then some, the place on her shin looked downright scary. At my request, she took a picture of it with her cell phone and text-messaged it to her parents. But the picture didn't look as bad as the bite.

In retrospect, I know we should have taken her to a doctor, but on Saturdays that would be a 50-mile drive from our little backwoods town, plus we had failed, for once, to get a "permission to treat" form and a copy of their insurance card from her parents.

By Sunday morning I was sure she had been bitten by a brown recluse spider, which, needless to say, was an unnerving thought. There was by then an enlarging hole in the middle of the red, inflamed, swollen "bite." I kept it clean and covered with a bandage. That was necessary, as when the bandage was removed, drainage from the bite ran down her leg. By then the whole leg hurt and she could hardly stand for me to touch it.

We made arrangements to meet her parents that day at the half-way point between their home and ours to return the girls to them. When her parents saw the bite, they immediately started calling around trying to find a nearby walk-in clinic that was open on Sunday and would take their health insurance. They wound up driving two hours to Tulsa, where she was examined at a walk-in clinic.