Very weird, but very cool. If true, is this something that could be used intentionally and that might work for others?However, at least one site is calling bullshit on this story - see below.
Miraculous if true, but Rod Brouhard is not convinced. In fact, he is calling bullshit on the spider part of the story. Not sure if he is right, but interesting.Paraplegic Man Suffers Spider Bite, Walks Again
He has been confined to a wheelchair for 20 years. Now a paraplegic man is walking again, and his doctors call it a miracle. CBS13 went to Manteca to find out how a spider bite helped get him back on his feet.
"I closed my eyes and then I was spinning like a flying saucer," explains David Blancarte.
A motorcycle accident almost killed David 21 years ago. At the time he might have wished he was dead.
"I asked my doctor, 'Sir what happened? I can't feel my legs'," said David.
Ever since, David's been relying on his wheelchair to get around. Then the spider bite. A Brown Recluse sent him to the hospital, then to rehab for eight months.
"I'm here for a spider bite. I didn't know I would end up walking," says David.
A nurse noticed David's leg spasm and ran a test on him.
"When they zapped my legs, I felt the current, I was like 'whoa' and I yelled," he says.
He felt the current and the rush of a renewed sense of hope.
"She says,'your nerves are alive. They're just asleep'," explained David.
Five days later David was walking.
"I was walking on the bar back and forth," he said.
Now David is out of the hospital and on his feet and walking.
David basks in his glory and gives a ray of hope to other hoping to walk again. The 48-year-old former boxer and dancer is taking it in stride, knowing his best days are still ahead.
David's dream is to see his 14-year-old twin daughters grow up and get married so he can walk them down the aisle and have that first dance.
Spider Bite Cures Paralysis -- Not!
Friday March 13, 2009A man from Manteca, California claims a spider bite was responsible for curing his paraplegia.
He'd been paralyzed since crashing his motorcycle in 1988. He claims a brown recluse spider bite put him in the hospital and then in rehab, where nurses discovered he had feeling in his legs. After months of physical therapy, he's walking again.
It's an amazing story, but I'm a little skeptical about one part: I doubt there was a spider.
Brown recluse spiders don't live in northern California, especially not in the cities. The only recluse spiders we have are desert recluses found in southern Cal scrublands and the high desert.
We do have MRSA, however. I'm more inclined to think he had some sort of staph infection rather than a spider bite. They can look the same. Indeed, unless you have the offending spider in hand it's probably better than 50/50 odds that your "spider bite" is really a skin infection.
As far as the spider curing his paralysis, well, I hope he's not really claiming that. I hope his point is that without the spider bite -- or infection, whatever -- that he wouldn't have been back at the hospital or in rehab. If that's his story, I'll agree.
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