When was the last time you were terrorized when you were in the shower, defenseless, ?

Ack, how traumatizing… I am sorry that this happened, and so glad to hear it was a dead friggin recluse. What a close call!

I guess I’ve only ever been terrorized in the shower by being in contact with big granddaddy cockroaches in the tub, but that doesn’t come close to touching a recluse with your foot. So, I got nothing comparable for you, but I just wanted to post cause it sounds like you had a horrible time just now. Hugs

Wow what a story…heh.

Well sometimes dudes with knives try to kill me, but since I’m so badass I end up burying them under my floorboards.

But nah, nothing cool ever happens to me in the shower.

Well…quite frankly the hairball grosses me out far more than the dead spider. lol
What a story, add it to your life anthology. haha
Once, years ago I had a similar experience only it was what I thought was a dust ball in my kitchen sink one morning, I picked it up and was a LIVE, fuzzy gray TARANTULA! lol
I used to live on a Tarantula migratory breeding path, every October they came in droves.

Oh God. I’m recovered enough to get rid of him, use an entire roll of TP and grab him and flush him down the toilent, but I took a picture for you first. I just want to cry.

@bookish1 Thanks for the hugs. Exactly what I needed. I need to have a girl moment….

My worst nightmare!!!

I’m with Coloma – I find that hair more disturbing.

Yeah, well, hair happens, guys.

@Dutchess_III Ewwwwww…..gag! Have a drink girly, a nice stiff one! Poor baby! :-(

Yeah, it was awful. And I’ve been so NICE to those guys! Taking them outside to “get rid” of them, rather than smashing them on sight. sniff. It was awful. To remember the feel of that under my clenched toes….AAAAAHHHHHHRRRRRGGGGGHHHHH!! More beer please. (I’m just really glad he wasn’t alive. I could lose my foot…or worse.)

Whoa what a gnarly spider.

But yeah I looked up recluse spider bites online…are you freakin serious? Those do that much damage? I think I need a beer too…I always handle those buggers, I think I won’t anymore haha.

Not quite in the same league, but yesterday, I was vacuuming out the underside of the fridge. This involves pulling the fridge out of it’s alcove, which isn’t easy, and then turning it so we can get access to underneath. The fan had stopped, which was causing the coolant to overheat in some places—making it hot enough to burn! Since we were going away, I was getting afraid of fires starting in our absence.

So we take off the back of the fridge and I discover all kinds of schmutz, and the insulation is not where is should be, and gradually it dawns on me that mice have been living in there and they have rearranged things to suit them, which means the cooling coils are covered with insulation instead of being free to exchange heat with the air.

So I’m vacuuming and there’s this long, sticklike thing—very thin long stick attached to something a bit larger, covered with a bit of gray and at the far end is this kind of tan colored ball-like thing.

I pick it up by the stick end and then let out a bit of a whoop when I realize what it is. I think my wife may have realized even sooner, because even before I whoop, she is racing out of the kitchen for the other end of the house.

Yeah. That’s how she feels about mice. Even if they are long dead, mummified mice. But ick! I did not need to be picking that thing up with my bare fingers, even if it was kind of cool. Mummified mouse skeleton!

Ewwww @wundayatta!!!

They’re dangerous, @Symbeline. BUT many of the “wounds” they show online are actually from the Mercer bacteria…the flesh eating bacteria. But the recluse are dangerous.

OK. I’m recovered enough to tell a couple more stories. When I was a kid, about 9, we moved from Clearwater, Florida to Bel Aire, Kansas. We’d been in our new house a couple of days, had our first ever tornado warning, even (even then I thought it was odd that my folks knew exactly what to do….too young to put twp and two together and realize that my dad was raised in Texas) Well, a few days after that my younger sisters and I were messing around in our new basement…when we saw this HUGE spider crawling across the floor!!! We went screaming upstairs to our dad who said, “Now, now girls. It can’t be all THAT big…” but he went down to check it out. It was a tropical tarantula that had traveled with us from Florida, crawled out of one of the boxes. It was very gratifying to hear him say, “Well, that IS pretty big, Not so silly after all, are we DAD!!!” and use an 8 ft 2 X 4 to get it!....But..I never grabbed it with my toes. OH GOD!!!!!!!!!!!!!

@wundayatta Even if they are long dead, mummified mice. But ick! I did not need to be picking that thing up with my bare fingers, even if it was kind of cool. Mummified mouse skeleton!

Whoa bro…those last sentences were kinda magical.

@Dutchess_III Do those spiders carry that bacteria? O_o

No @Symbeline. They’re poisonous. When they bite you the poison causes the skin to have a hard time healing…it just wants to keep sloughing off. Can get infected really easily, too.

Man I never knew that…what if cats get bit by them? Every time they see a spider, my cats go after them. Although my cats are probably way faster and deadlier than I am when chasing them, but still. :/

Well…they’d have to get through a lot of hair to get to the skin.

Oh you guys are wussies, I find dehydrated tree frogs and mummified tail less lizards under my furniture all the time, and don’t forget the rattlesnakes!
This morning I picked up a de-cat-itated baby Gopher by the tail and flung it into the weeds, us mountain mamas, we’re a special breed! lolol

An old girlfriend of mine got the Psycho treatment in her house (before we met). He didn’t try to kill her in earnest but did cut her hand. No joke.

>shudder< I think I was terrorized enough just reading this!!! Although there was an incident once: we have a bathroom in the basement(previous owners lived in the basement while trying to finish the rest of the house, so it’s semi-finished) that we use for dog baths. It wouldn’t drain properly, something gross-looking in the drain… it was a dead, gross, MOUSE- ugh!!! DH was called in to deal with it. But at least I wasn’t trying to shower in there!

I had shampoo in my eye & was desperate for a shite.
I know how Stevie Wonder must feel at a concert in the middle of singing “I just called…..”
when a turtle’s head is emerging from his twitching anus.

@Coloma I can handle dead things. What I can’t handle is picking something squishy up TWICE not realizing what it was. Shudder.

This morning, about 5 a.m. I got a turrible Charlie Horse in my calf…the same leg that has the foot that I picked the spider up with. I got it under control after several seconds, but I’ve still been limping around all day because that leg has BETRAYED me TWICE!! SHUT-TER!!

@Dutchess_III A point of clarification. Mercer bacteria is actually MRSA bacteria (it took me awhile to figure out what you were talking about). And MRSA is not the flesh eating bacteria—it’s methicillin resistant staph aureus. It’s no more virulent than regular staff, but it’s resistant to antibiotics. The flesh eating bacteria is from clostridium perfinges, which is a totally different bug. Brown recluse spiders cause local inflammation and necrosis that is not unlike chronic staph infection, but it’s not infectious related. It’s a toxin, although it can get superinfected.

Urghhh [shivers]
Brush your hair just before you shower

Damn it @Rarebear! You changed your avatar! I’m reading going, “Who is this know-it-all poo who seems to know what he’s talking about!!” Ah. Thanks for the clarification.

So what is the flesh eating bacteria? Remember the pics I showed you of the HOLE in my son’s back? The docs said it was MRS A. (I’m MRS V in myclass room btw.)

I know you guys are just dying to see the hole that was in my son’s back! I’ll do my best to find them!!

Why in the world are people freaking out over a little bit of hair on the drain? I clean it out almost every day!

OK People! Remember that story I wrote up there ^^^^ about the tropical spider that came to Kansas from Florida with us? And before he saw it Dad said, “Oh, it cain’t be THAT big!”

Oh, yes they can

This is pretty much the size of the spider that crawled out from our moving boxes. Seriously.

@Dutchess_III , I had one that big in our airplane hanger. I am deathly afraid of spiders and I freaked when I saw it. I had a Hudson sprayer with bug killer in it and I swear it took half the bottle to kill it. I was still in shock when my husband arrived and he didn’t believe me either. It was dead by then so he could see it. It was a real mess cleaning up the bug spray. I go back into shock just thinking about it.