Sarah Neal was spending her summer in rural Texas when she woke up one day with a strange, crawling sensation on her skin. However, little did she know, it would turn into a rapidly spreading rash that would completely change her looks. In her TikTok video, which has now gone viral, the woman documented the entire thing, something which felt like a nightmare for her.
Speaking with PEOPLE, Neal said, “I got bit at like two in the morning on a Friday, on my left b-tt cheek. I felt something crawling, reached down, grabbed it, and threw it across the room.”
Initially, she didn’t pay much attention to it. However, during a movie night with her husband, she noticed her legs and arms were getting rashes. “I looked in the mirror, and my face was bright red and hot to the touch.”
Sarah revealed that when she reached home, she was already burning up. The next morning, it all turned real serious when she woke up with a swollen and puffy face. “It felt like a really tight sunburn,” Neal explained. Her face wasn’t just red anymore, but rather, there were pustules all over it.
“Everything was hot and tight, and I was so uncomfortable that I ended up going to the ER,” the woman explained in her TikTok video. However, she felt “gaslit” by the doctors there as she was sent home only with steroids and antibiotics, while the suspicion of a spider bite was also dismissed.
Following her mother’s advice, Sarah went to see a dermatologist who caught her off guard when he said that it was an AGEP rash, which usually comes from antibiotics. However, he also added, “there are really rare cases where it’s been triggered by a brown recluse spider bite.”
“The rash started fading after the medication, and the bite area turned black and got hard,” Neal revealed the result of the steroid treatment. However, when she took further medical help, she found out that the tissue around the bite was necrotic, which means it was dying.
It just got worse with time, and it was so painful that she couldn’t even sit or lie down. She was taking antibiotics as well, and then she paid another visit to the ER. This time, she was told that the wound looked okay.
To her surprise, it healed on its own. “I had pain meds, and after a while it scabbed, the scab fell off, and I slowly got back to my normal life,” Sarah said.
“It was about two weeks before I could sit without pain. It was honestly the craziest two weeks of my life,” Neal said, recalling the time.
