Night of the Black Widow

One of L.A.’s less publicized diversities is the many ways in which it offers death. One can get liposucked to heaven, hang-glide into the ocean, overdose on natural vitamin supplements or be bitten by venomous creatures.

These and other designer deaths are offered to anyone willing to experiment with the newest beauty treatment, try the latest danger, seek the newest health aid or commune with nature in any one of several scenic canyons.

I am not likely to be liposucked into the hereafter, but the possibility remains that I could be bitten. I’ve been a canyon dweller for 25 years, and it is only with the greatest amount of caution that I remain alive.

I have found both rattlesnakes and black widows not only on trails through the mountains but also around my house. They are recognizable by the fact that after visiting my yard, the snakes are headless and the spiders flat.

I realize that nature lovers are offended by my aggressive stance toward God’s simple creatures, but it is only the venomous ones that suffer unpleasant consequences for invading my property. I do not, for instance, kill squirrels or hummingbirds.

Enhancing my view that dangerous creatures ought to be dealt with severely is the story of Susan Fesler, a nature lover, who awoke one morning with a black widow sitting on her right eye.

Twenty days and a nightmare of pain later, she’s still a nature lover but the spiders have got to go.

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Fesler, 37, her husband, Matthew, and their two young children live in Kagel Canyon, a place of peace and beauty and things that bite. She awoke on the aforementioned morning with her 6-year-old son Brandon saying, “Mommy, you’ve got a black monster on your face!”

She had to do nothing more than open her eyes to get bitten. She whacked the spider away, smashed it and flushed it down the toilet. Under different circumstances, she probably would have walked it out the door but human instinct in this case prevailed over nature-love.

The bite was like a bee sting, and it was only after her face became numb and swollen that she went off to the emergency ward of Holy Cross Hospital.

Normally a black widow bite would require only an antitoxin shot and 72 hours of observation, but in Fesler’s case other conditions prevailed. Not only is an eye bite unusual, shooting poison directly into the bloodstream, but she was additionally found to be allergic to the antivenin.

Examination discovered that she was probably also bitten on the neck, intensifying her body’s reaction to the poison. Partial paralysis set in on her right side, followed by muscle cramps that kept her in agony.

“They were horrible, worse than child labor,” she said the other day, recovering slowly in her home. “They would go up from my feet to my legs to my stomach and sometimes to my chest. I couldn’t breathe.”

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As if that weren’t enough, a combination of drugs used to treat the violent muscle spasms caused her heart to stop beating for two minutes. Only through extraordinary means was it restarted without causing brain damage. Later, another drug interfered with her breathing and had to be abandoned.

“No one had ever treated anyone bitten on the eye,” she said. “They went to the Internet to try and find out what to do but came up empty. Finally they stopped all medication and left me screaming in pain.”

The spasms alone lasted for 12 days while medical tests continued to chart the course of the poison. Finally, after three weeks, missing her children and weary of the hospital, Fesler insisted on going home.

Her husband, meanwhile, had dispatched five black widow nests under their house, and the day after she got there, Fesler killed another black widow and narrowly escaped being bitten by a baby rattlesnake, which she sent scurrying down a hillside.

Although still feeling as though she’d been hit by a truck, she insists it will take more than a spider to drive her from her otherwise bucolic canyon. “I love it here,” she said. “Every day is heaven.”

I’ve heard those exact words from other canyon dwellers who have faced death by fire, flood, slide and bite but would rather die that way in beauty than, say, by a bad butt-tuck in Beverly Hills. It’s the difference in lifestyle that counts.

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Al Martinez’s column appears every Tuesday and Friday. He can be reached online atal.martinez@latimes.com