NEED TO KNOW
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Halle Hizer, 20, and her grandmother were on a weeklong beach vacation in Rhodes, a Greek Island, when she woke up with a swollen ear
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She assumed it was a mosquito bite, and when she sought medical care on vacation, she was given antibiotics, which proved ineffective
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The college student developed an abscess and required surgery when she got home, which is when doctors realized she’d been bitten by something else entirely
A woman who thought she had a mosquito bite on her ear developed an abscess and needed surgery — but it was something else entirely.
Halle Hizer, 20, and her grandmother were two days into a weeklong vacation in Rhodes, a Greek island known for its beaches, in early June, when she woke with a swollen ear. But Hizer, who hails from the English town of Enfleld, said she dismissed it as irritation from wearing her earbuds.
But the next day, “it kept getting bigger and bigger and pus started coming out of it,” the college student said, according to Daily Mail. She thought it was a mosquito bite and sought help from a local pharmacist, who gave her an antibiotic cream.
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Halle Hizer needed to undergo surgery when she returned home from vacation.
Her ear doubled in size, swelling “like a cauliflower.” But at the insistence of her grandmother, Hizer sought medical care, and says the doctor “just took one look over and said ‘You’ve got a bad infection in your ear,’ and that’s it. He gave me antibiotics and I was taking them — but my ear wasn’t getting any better. It was getting worse.”
After flying home on June 6, she began to experience a “stabbing” pain and shared that she was scared she might lose her ear. Hizer went straight to the hospital, where she says doctors told her the antibiotics she’d been prescribed were “strange“ because, “we haven’t used this antibiotic for years in medicine because it’s been proven it doesn’t work anymore.”
“Because I wasn’t given the right antibiotics, my ear ended up getting so infected to the point pus was coming out that was basically poison,” Hizer said. “Every five minutes my ear would be leaking. The doctors told me I would need surgery to remove the abscess.”
It was during surgery that doctors realized what had caused the infection: “It was a venomous spider. You could see from the back the bite marks,” she said. The most likely culprit: the Mediterranean recluse spider — also known as a violin spider — which is “well known for their ability to cause skin necrosis,” per the National Library of Medicine.
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Halle Hizer says doctors saw the bite marks when she underwent surgery.
While she says her “ear has gone back to normal and it’s not huge anymore,” Hizer says “I have a new fear of spiders.”
She also plans on thoroughly researching her hotel before her next vacation — and advises others to “make sure you have repellent with you and make sure the hotel is clean.”
”We went for a week just to relax,” she says, “and it ended up becoming a horror show.”
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