Spider bite

It's quite common for people to come to the Emergency Department reporting a spider bite, but most of the time it turns out that they weren't actually bitten by one of our eight-legged friends. (This phenomenon is very interesting to me, and I have a theory about it that I should share in a future post.)

However, tonight our team in the ED had a rare moment of being able to sit down together for a few minutes, and as the newly-minted big bad R2 it was my duty to use the time well to do some teaching for the intern and medical student. So we talked about black widows and brown recluses and the diagnosis and treatment of actual spider bites. And the weird part wasn't the medical information (although some of it is kind of weird), but that I was sitting there, knowing a little bit about the subject and able to share it. Maybe these long hours in the hospital are driving something through my thick, sleep-deprived skull after all.