This picture of country singer Meghan Linsey, runner up on NBC’s The Voice in 2015, was taken two weeks ago. As you can see, Linsey has a noticeable scar under her left eye, but all thing considered she’s a very lucky lady. Back in February Linsey awoke one morning with a stinging sensation on her face, and looked down to find a dead spider in her hand. Unfortunately, the spider turned out to be a brown recluse — one of the two most deadly species of spider found in the United States (next to the Black Widow) — the venom of which can cause horrific damage to the human body even when treated.
Thankfully Linsey had the sense to rush to urgent care, bringing the dead spider along with her, where she was given with antibiotics and saline. But that was only the beginning of her ordeal, which she explained in an interview with People this week.
“The swelling was the first thing, and then I ended up just having crazy, crazy symptoms,” Linsey tells PEOPLE. “I had muscle spasms, then I had a body rash all over. They tell people to not look up things on WebMD, and I had looked up everything on WebMD and I had every symptom. Every day was another thing.”
“I was supposed to be getting better, but I was getting worse – up until day nine, which is when the symptoms stopped happening and the necrosis started on my face,” she explains.
Things were about to get a lot worse before they got better. Linsey documented her progress for the next several weeks on Instagram, and as a warning, some of the images below are not for the faint of heart.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BRRRlM7gFT4/
Linsey attributed her amazingly quick recovery to hyperbaric chamber treatments, a special wound healing gel dressing called Stratamed that can be used under makeup (since she still regularly performs), and the dang wonder of the human body’s ability to heal itself. She admits that her makeup routine is a lot more involved than it used to be, but is overall just happy to be alive after everything she went through.
All in all, she hopes that her ordeal will help raise awareness about the brown recluse spider (and why you do not mess with them), as she says, “It’s not talked about a lot and I have a way to get the word out.”
(Via People)