Bite Victim Loses Arms, Legs, Part of Nose : Spiders: Mira Loma housewife who suffered through toxic shock and five-month coma after encounter with brown recluse considers herself lucky that she didn’t die.

Last July, Valerie Slimp was shampooing her carpet when she felt a sharp pain in her thigh.

“I thought at first I’d pulled a muscle,” the 40-year-old woman recalled. But as the pain grew, she began to feel flu-like symptoms. Within two days, she had gone into toxic shock and a coma.

Five months later, Slimp awoke, minus her arms, legs and tissue from her nose. Her limbs were amputated due to advancing blood poisoning.

Slimp considered herself lucky. At least the spider hadn’t killed her.

“I always thought if anything was going to happen it would be a car accident or something,” Slimp said. “Maybe get hit by a Mack truck you don’t see coming. But to get bit by a spider?”

More Americans die from lightning strikes or skiing accidents than spider bites, said Rick Vetter, an entomologist at the University of California at Riverside.

Nationwide, an average of 43 people a year die from insect bites, mostly bee stings, Vetter said. Every three or four years, someone, usually a child, dies from a spider bite, he said.

In Slimp’s case, by the time the venom was identified as that of a brown recluse spider, she was unconscious.

Rare in California, brown recluse spiders are common in the Midwest and South, Vetter said. But often, nothing happens when someone is bitten by one. “It depends on the person’s body chemistry more than anything,” he said.

Now, Slimp uses an electric wheelchair around her home. Her husband, Randy, combs her hair and helps with her makeup.

He and their daughter, Charlene, 12, and son, Stuart, 9, also feed her, although she’s learning to use a fork and other tools strapped to her elbows.

She is looking forward to getting artificial limbs soon.

Another couple gave her a golf cart for use outside. But it needs seat belts, because Slimp awoke from her coma with a new fear--falling over. “Suddenly I realized I couldn’t grab hold of anything,” she said.

Eventually, she said, she wants to get back to work in the family auto parts business.

“I think the one thing is that before this happened--you know life can get pretty down sometimes when you’re strapped for every penny--and now I like living,” she said. “I really do. I’m glad I’m back.”

Her husband said, “The brightest thing of all is that Valerie is alive, and she can get better and she can get back into society completely.”

He recalled other people’s suggestions that he start a new life without his wife, and how, when she regained consciousness, she told him he was free to leave.

“To me,” he said, “that’s inconceivable.”