To think this could have been a spider bite?

[hungryhippo28]

A few weeks ago I woke up in the night to a bad itching on my leg. The next morning I had a beast of a bite on my leg and another on my tummy. It looked like two puncture wounds and the whole area was red but I've been bitten before so I wasn't too worried.

This may or may not have been a coincidence but the next evening I started vomiting and had diarrhoea really badly for about 12 hours. It passed but I felt rotten for a few days. Meanwhile the area around the bite on my leg was red and spreading outwards in a circular shape. It itched for about a week.

Three weeks on nearly and the redness has faded and it doesn't itch anymore but there is still a faint redness around the bite. I'm not concerned anymore as whatever it was has gotten better and it only occurred to be afterwards that the sickness could have been linked. But out of interest could this have been a nasty spider bite? I've never had anything like it before.

Quite likely yes. My father had what we believe was a nasty spider bite after carrying out work in someone’s loft and he was violently sick and had an elevated heart rate for 24/48 hours before slowly getting better. The wound area was very red, swollen and sore too. We didn’t think anything of it at the time but I think he should have gone to A&E.

Yes I never put two and two together with the sickness, I thought I'd picked up a bug. But then the red circle around the bite kept getting larger and I started wondering if it was linked. I have had bites before from various critters but never anything that has made me that unwell. The red circle is still there now albeit much more faded. Do we even have poisonous spiders in the uk?