5-Year-Old Mendon Girl Recovering After Black Widow Spider Bite

MENDON (CBS) -- A Mendon family is planning to have their backyard fumigated after their daughter was bitten by a black widow spider.

Kristine Donovan said the bite on her 5-year-old daughter Kailyn's leg just looked like a bruise--but then it turned black, and they took her to the hospital.

Infectious disease specialists at UMass Memorial Hospital confirmed it was from a black widow. Like the brown recluse spider, black widow venom kills flesh around the bite.

"She never felt it bite her," Kristine said. "It could have been in her jeans in the location where it bit her, we just don't know."

Now, she's being treated with antibiotics and a lot of dressing changes, and her mom says the bite is healing.

"She's happier now that we're not in the hospital," Kristine said. "It doesn't seem to bother her. She looks at it, she doesn't think it's gross, so I try not to make a big deal out of it, to make her nervous or anything."

Kristine says Kailyn is doing fine--she's expected to make a full recovery, without even a scar, by the time she starts kindergarten in September.

In the meantime, the family is taking extra precautions.

"We're going to be spraying, and they're going to come in the house and do some spraying in here too," said Kristine. "But the doctor said it definitely was outside, they don't chase people. It probably was bothered. We've been doing a lot of yard work, it probably upset one of them and she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time."

Mike Nelson of Norfolk County Agricultural High School says the spiders are very rare.

"They're not common, and the places they like to live are places people don't like to be," Nelson said. "Old attics and sheds, those types of places. You don't want to be so afraid to go outside. The incidents are very rare."

WBZ NewsRadio 1030's Lana Jones reports