A Kansas family’s camping trip turned into a months-long nightmare after a mother of four was bitten by spiders, developed life-threatening complications and was given as little as three days to live.
Britagne Miller, from Goddard, Kansas, was sitting around a campfire with her husband Jake and their four children at Cheney State Park on May 28 when multiple spiders crawled up her leg and body, leaving bites across her skin.
She thought little of it at the time.
Four days later one of the bites on her calf began to swell dramatically and a burning, stabbing pain shot down her leg and into her foot. She was admitted to Wesley Hospital in Wichita on June 4.
Surgery and a fight to survive
Doctors discovered Miller had developed a hematoma and needed immediate surgery. Nearly 300ml of blood clots were removed from her calf and a drain was inserted to help the wound heal.
What should have been a straightforward recovery quickly became critical.
Miller had two pre-existing blood-clotting disorders discovered during a previous pregnancy, as well as liver damage and multiple allergies to food and medication. Her body struggled to cope and she became frequently incoherent in the days that followed.
Doctors then suspected she was developing end-stage liver failure and after two weeks they recommended hospice.
“They gave me three days up to a month to live, so that was scary,” Miller told local outlet KAKE.
She spent ten days in the MICU and further time in the cardiac ICU before being moved to a regular ward. She received blood transfusions, plasma, platelets, antibiotics and numerous other treatments to try to stabilize her condition.
A second crisis
Five days into her recovery, the surgical wound became infected with a staph and gram-negative infection that caused tissue necrosis. Doctors performed two emergency bedside procedures and placed her on additional antibiotics.
Miller has said she reached a point where she wanted to give up but the thought of her children kept her going.
While Miller fought for her life, her husband stayed by her side and cared for their children. His employer eventually let him go for failing to meet work schedule expectations.
“There was never a question about where I needed to be, but losing my income and insurance has put us in a tough spot financially,” he said.
Miller’s mother flew in from Utah to help look after the children. The family is now fundraising to cover ongoing medical costs, weekly specialist visits, transport, utilities and household bills on GoFundMe.
Miller is expected to eventually be able to come home but will require consistent home health care and physiotherapy.
She is not yet eligible for a liver transplant, because her blood-clotting conditions would need to be stable enough to tolerate the operation – a process likely to take months.
The kind of spider that bit Miller
No definitive identification was made of the spider species involved, but experts suspect a brown recluse, because it’s the one of the two venomous spiders in Kansas alongside the black widow.
The brown recluse favors dark hidden spaces such as under logs, in rock piles and inside unused shoes and boxes. It typically bites when it feels trapped between skin and clothing.
Dr. Raymold Cloyd, a horticultural entomologist at Kansas State University, advised anyone camping or handling long-stored boxes to wear gloves and shake out shoes before putting them on.
While a brown recluse bite is usually manageable in healthy adults, it can have severe consequences for people with pre-existing medical conditions like in Miller’s case.
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