My brush with a tarantula

Twelve years ago I went to a coworker's house one day after work.  She was excited to show me her pet tarantula.  She took the tarantula out of his tank and allowed me to pet him.  I had never handled a spider this large before and being that I was only 16 at the time I was fascinated with the large bug.  I gently stroked his back for a couple of seconds and she then placed him back into the tank.  I barely touched the odd creature.  As we were walking out of the room I made a quick wipe of my eye with my finger, something I have done thousands of times with my finger, but this time it was different.  Immediately after my finger touched my eye I felt a sharp burning pain in my eye.  I thought to myself that I got something stuck in my eye.  I went to the bathroom and tried my best to rinse my eye out.  The pain was so great I wasn't able to open my eye.  I walked home with my right eye shut in pain.  My eye throbbed the rest of the evening.  I had to go to bed early that night because my family was taking a one week vacation to Alaska.  I fell asleep with my eye throbbing with pain not having any explanation as to why.

I woke up the next morning and the pain was gone.  I didn't think too much of it as I was very excited about my trip to Alaska.  I figured the pain must have been a hair or dust that got into my eye and it went away over night.  Over the next week I enjoyed my vacation in Alaska.  My mom however noticed that my right eye was getting redder every day that went by.  I wasn't worried about it because my eye wasn't hurting anymore.  I just figured it was a little irritated and it would go away.  My family vacation came and went, but the eye was as red as it could be by the end of my trip.  When we came back from Alaska, my mom immediately made an appointment with the eye doctor.

A few days later I went to the eye doctor.  The doctor took me into his exam room where he got his tools and started to examine my eye.  As he was examining my right eye I heard him slightly sighing.  He sounded puzzled.  He then asked me if I had been doing any work with fiberglass.  I told him "no" and asked him why he wanted to know that.  He said he counted 23 micro particles in my eye and they appeared to be small particles of fiberglass.  I explained to him that I never worked with fiberglass.  He then started to ask my about any and all problems I had with my eye.  I explained the tarantula story to him, not really thinking the tarantula story would matter, but I gave him all the details.  He then left the room and said he would be back in a few minutes.

A few minutes later the doctor entered the room and he explained to me that he did some research on tarantula's and that he discovered that tarantula's have microscopic hairs on the back of their legs that they shoot out as a defense mechanism when they are afraid.  He stated that these hairs are almost identical to micro particles of fiberglass.  I was flabbergasted.

My eye doctor sent me to a specialist that I had to go to once a month.  After my initial exam with the specialist, her and her colleagues looked through the medical books and they together decided on what they wanted to do with my eye.  The tarantula I had petted was fortunately the most common species of tarantula kept as a pet and there have actually been a couple of other documented cases of this happening with this species of tarantula.  The doctors decided they did not want to operate and they wanted to instead allow the hairs to work their way to the back part of my eye where the white blood cells would attack them.  They predicted this process would take a year.  The process ended up taking two years for all of the hairs to disappear.  After all of the hairs were gone my eye was scarred in three different spots, although this can't be seen unless you have the right tools.  Every month I went to the specialist, there was a line of eye doctors out the door waiting to examine me.  I became a guinea pig.  All of the doctors were fascinated with my eye since this was a once in a lifetime case, if that.

Fortunately I suffered no blindness or any other serious problems from my brush with tarantula hairs.  Since then I have never handled a tarantula.  I have also learned to do my homework when working with a new species of animal that I am not familiar with.  Cats and dogs are no longer the only animals people keep as pets anymore.  There are a wide variety of exotic animals that many people keep as pets, even though many of these people probably have no business keeping these exotic creatures as pets.  My friend was uneducated about her tarantula and had no idea about the defense mechanism they had and she therefore could not warn me.

If in the future if you decide to adopt or take in an exotic creature, do your homework.  Find out about any odd tendencies or characteristics that they may have.  Some shrews for example are venomous.  A few species of parrots live longer than humans.  Do you need a special license to take in that exotic creature?  If you take a parrot in what are you going to do with it after you pass on, since it will most likely outlive you?  These are just a couple of examples of what you need to think of when deciding whether or not to own an exotic species.  There are many things that I am not even aware of, just like when I was 16 and petting a tarantula.