That spider bite could have killed me, part 1

(Found this in a journal, copy and pasted it here, and apart from a few small changes for clarity, it's exactly as I wrote it in Winter-Spring 2011-2012, a period of time when I think the Church arranged for me to be stranded in West Virginia and, possibly, be poisoned.) 

(UPDATE: September 2014: I still have symptoms of this poison in my system, an illness that, in the past year, three different doctors have not been able to diagnose.)  

Part 2 is here and Part 3 is here ) 
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I’d wake up each morning not sure where I was.  The building went up in the early 1800s as a boarding house in this small town in the country a 3-hour drive from Washington D.C., but that didn't matter to me as I had no way to get to D.C. or even out of this town.  I never had any reason to want to live in West Virginia, yet here I was, stranded. 

In 2010 I’d taken off to roam around the country interviewing other pedophile priest victims, trying to develop City of Angels Blog into something that could really accomplish something. 

Instead by summer 2011, I got sidetracked, swept aside, and outright abandoned and now I was in a flat in a house in small town West Virginia, totally isolated. 

And I woke up with a huge spider bite on my thigh, or a bite from some other massive insect whose venom under my skin was rapidly expanding into a puss-filled bubble, a good three inches wide.  And pulsating, I woke up with a hot red pulsating infected insect bite on my leg on top of my thigh.

I've had PTSD since age five, so I've been on this endless treadmill going Faster Than the Speed of Life.  No matter what happens, I keep running and running and running until I solve the problem.

Salt on my own wounds 

Salt. 

Table salt in a shaker. 

I poured table salt directly on the pulsating red infected five inch diameter bump of spider bite. 

Yow it hurt.  I was pouring salt on my own wound.  Burn!  Pain!  I hollered and it didn't matter, no one could hear me in that isolated place.  YEOW!! It hurt. 

But it worked.  It took about two weeks, but several times a day, I’d pour salt from the salt shaker directly on the massive pussy expanse on the front of my thigh and it would burn like hell, but then slowly over 2-3 weeks the puss drained out. 

I had to tape tissue over the wound and change it several times a day, this oozing mixture of green puss and blood and other unidentifiable human liquid, and then I went about my day isolated in that West Virginia furnished room, doing my job from L.A. over the internet, not talking to an in person soul.   

Today there’s not even a scar. 

Silence. 

My room in this two hundred year old house had one small window that since it was more than two stories up, had not been cleaned on the outside in decades, so the tiny inlet of light came through dripping rust, caked on dirt, debris, and dead bugs.  I could open the door of the apartment and sit on the porch, I could do that for days and never see another human being.  

A few weeks back, I had been dropped off on the road outside this building, where rooms for rent had been advertised on Craigslist.  The woman who dropped me off here was long gone.  The neighbor who I befriended here in the early weeks had moved away.  The building manager was tweaking on some prescribed medication and scared me so I avoided him.  In town, a ways down the road, there was a bar and an organic grocery and a 7 Eleven, so with Amazon delivering household items, I did not do without necessities of life, living in that furnished room in the back of a boarding house in Podunk, West Virginia. 

But now here I was with this infection on my leg getting worse and I had no idea how to get to a doctor from where I was.  I called the one who had a white picket fence around his medical practice downtown and was told that without health insurance he could not and would not see me.  I said, I’ll pay cash, but could not even make an appointment.  They said, Call blah-blah-blah hospital. 

I had heard that there was a new hospital built just outside town named blah-blah-blah.  I didn't know exactly where it was.  I had no one to ask for a ride.  There was no transit, there was not even a taxi.  In this town, people who didn't have cars asked friends and family for a ride, and I’d been dropped off here by a fellow "survivor" and the person who was supposed to pick me up and carry me from here to Chicago disappeared, I think now he was someone who contacted me through the blog as he was a handler working for the church.  He passed himself off as a fellow pedophile priest survivor and was really working for the church.  That one person played an integral part in me being left here in Podunk, West Virginia, as well as other strange things that happened in Chicago a year later. The Church knew I would be vulnerable to all kinds of unusual forces by being a somewhat disabled, somewhat broke, old lady in a strange town in Appalachia.

I think they left me there and I was supposed to die.

But PTSD since age five, after being raped at age five by a priest, had given me remarkable survival skills, ironically enough.  That's what PTSD is, your body finds ways to survive trauma.  

The Reason I Am Putting This Incident Here Is: 

Later I told a resident of the town in the park about how I self medicated away a poison spider bite and when I described the thing that had appeared on my leg, she said, “My cousin got bit that way, but them spiders they don't live here near town. My cousin was out by Shuster Creek when he got bit.  He weren't nowhere near town when he got bit by one of them spiders, them poison spiders ain't never bit no one here in town." 

She scrutinized me and asked, "Do you got an enemy? Someone who might be putting a poison spider under your door to bite you?” 

I sipped my soda and didn't answer. 

(To be continued) 

CUT PARAGRAPHS: 

A few weeks back I’d tried to engage a couple locals in town in conversation about how one gets around here if they don't have a car.  I’d said, “Is there anything like a public bus or public transit here?” and the woman in the park wrinkled her nose in distaste and said, “Why on earth would you want that?”  The conversation had not gone much farther, now I wasn’t even sure which of the other houses here on the outskirts of town was her dwelling.  Last time I’d knocked on the building manager’s door he’d stomped out into the hallway and hollered at me, “You moron!  I sleep until noon every day, I told you that when you moved in.”  So I left the kitchen sink dripping and didn't bother him again. 

(another cut paragraph: )

I stared out at the view from my doorstep where I sat on rotting wooden steps.  The shack stared back at me.  All summer I’d see people walk up this trail near my house and not come back.  When fall came and the leaves fell from the trees, it was revealed, there a few hundred yards from the door to my little furnished flat in this ancient building, was an old abandoned falling down shack maybe a hundred years old, where three, maybe twelve, homeless guys came and went.  So now I felt like I could feel their eyes on me, even though they were apparently inside the shack, or out and about on the town. . . not anyone who could help me get treatment for a spider bite. 

AND ONE MORE: 

Who could I ask for help and what kind of help could anyone here give me?  If I got a ride to the blah-blah-blah hospital that was somewhere over those hills a few miles from here, how would I get back, I had not really met any neighbors. Plus the hospital might not see me when all I have is a California ID and no health insurance. I read stories in the local weekly about people not getting treatment at local emergency rooms and they had local IDs. 

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Kay Ebeling

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ALSO CUT:
In the 1980s going Faster than the speed of life got me through an unexpected pregnancy when I was single and age forty.  I ran and ran and kept a roof over our heads and got my daughter to early adulthood in pretty good shape, well sort of. 

Again, oh Lizzie, I am so sorry. 
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