Thank you, I actually still have a hole in my leg from a bite when I was 8. I do remember distinctly what it looked like. It was probably a black widow or possibly a brown recluse. My grandmother poured peroide on it and the poison came out for what seemed like forever. It was two holes with a knot in the middle then the two holes eventually turned into one big hole.
That was back when you only went to the hospital if you were actually dying, though. I didn't have any reactions to it and don't remember ever getting sick. I think we caught it literally right after it happened--and I never felt it. Hmmm.
(This is a long story so if you want to skip to the last two paragraphs thats fine)
But these four bites were all different from that one, and I remember with the first two thinking, "wow those kinda look like those bullseye rashes I heard about before, but naw I'm exaggerating, they're just spider bites or something." One swelled nearly all the way up and down my arm, but I was on my first day of a driving vacation and at the end of the day put some peroxide and cold packs on it and went away in a couple of days, gone even before I got back from vacation. But I also remember thinking, wow that bugger got all the way into the muscle tissue because it was my arm muscles which were actually swelling up aside from the whole outside of my arm being red.
But it went away in a couple of days with no immediate symptoms, so I thought nothing of it, even after having unexplainble extreme fatigue, and even when the joint and muscle pain set in, the bites didnt occur to me, til a doc told me it was probably some virus or bacteia that would need to run its course. And I thought, well I dont know anyone who has THIS, then I remembered the bites from a few weeks earlier. We did a Western Blot which came back IGM41 present only, which is first sign of early Lyme but she told me that means the test is negative.
Well then two more bites showed up, first they were the size of tiny pimples, in different spots than the first two, both turned into bullseye rashes, but still different from the first two, second was nearly 6 inches across. Got a pic of that one and the smaller one.
But then a neighbor of mine whose mom also lives in the same complex (townhomes) got a bite from something that made her whole side of her face swell up and then her throat swelled up and she had to go to emergency in the hospital. All her docs told her it was a spider bite.
OK, long story, LOL, but anyway, I've been having a lot of pain at the sites where the largest bites were and am still trying to figure out if some or all 4 of them, which happened in July were spider bites that looked like bullseyes but still infected me with something, and also to find out if tick bites can cause recurring pain at the site (in the muscle or tissue UNDER the skin not above the skin in this case) or if only spider bites do that.
If you were able to tolerate reading this long post, thank you for doing so, and I thank all of you for responding, and do any of you know if tick bites can cause recurring pain at the site and internal damage at the site? Thank you again for helping me to sort through this.