One night, while in my recording studio in Tucker, Georgia, my ankle started getting red, itchy and swollen. I love walking and hiking, so I assumed I had hurt it on a recent trek. Three days later, I was hobbling, unable to put pressure on my leg without severe pain. What worried me the most was that the colour had changed. My ankle was no longer red and angry; it was now blue and purple.

The timing couldn’t have been any worse. I’m a musician and had a gig that evening. I kept telling myself I had just knocked my ankle and it was bruising.

Showing up to the gig later on was a blur. My brow was pouring with sweat. I pushed through the performance, although I don’t know how. My friends became concerned. I tried to show them my ankle. I had wrapped it up with compression bandages so I could get my shoe on, but it had swollen so much it was a struggle to get the shoe off again.

“I think I’m going to pass out,” was all I could muster. My friends drove me straight to the emergency room. I had to be carried in as I was too ill to walk.

The doctors were confused. They didn’t know what to treat me for, as I didn’t know what had happened. On closer inspection, they thought they could see some sort of bite on my ankle, but it was hard to see through the swelling. They put me on three types of antibiotics. They knew my leg was infected, but they weren’t sure what by, and hoped one would work.

My entire leg was on fire. It was as though someone had slit it open with a knife. I was hooked up to an IV drip while I waited for an infectious disease specialist to arrive. Then suddenly scratch marks appeared on my leg, travelling upwards. I hadn’t touched it, and was horrified to see them appear out of nowhere.

The specialist had arrived, and the marks concerned him. He got out a thick black marker and started drawing horizontal lines on my thigh. “If the scratches reach these lines, you’re at risk of amputation,” he told me. My mouth went dry. He inspected the area where the infection had started, and noticed a bullseye-like-mark with a puncture in the middle.

The doctor said he thought I’d been bitten by a brown recluse spider. Earlier that week, a woman had come into the ward with a bite on her hand. She had the same symptoms as me, with scratch marks up her arm – they’re signs of an infection. She ended up having most of her arm amputated.

A brown recluse is a common spider in Georgia and across the south and midwest of the US – deaths from its bites are rare, but have been reported. I started to tremble. I was terrified that I’d left it too late and began to punish myself for not coming into the hospital as soon as I’d felt the pain.

For the next few days, I lay in bed, battling through the nausea. The room felt like it was spinning. How can such a little creature do so much damage? I watched my leg, checking for any signs that the infection was spreading past the black lines.

After five days, the antibiotics started to work and the hospital said I could be discharged as long as I continued to take them for 10 days. I was terrified of leaving, as the infection was still present. My ankle was no longer as inflamed but it was still very pink.

It took a couple of weeks after being discharged for me to be able to walk without pain. The stress of what was going to happen to my leg was hard to shake off. I kept worrying that they’d made a mistake, and I felt exhausted.

I still have the bite mark from the spider to this day – to me, it’s a reminder that I should be grateful for being alive. The experience has put me off hiking. I only recently plucked up the courage to go walking again in the area where I may have been bitten.

Now my friends jokingly call me Spiderman – but, needless to say, unlike him, I did not get superpowers after the bite. I’ll always be grateful to them for driving me to the ER.

One thing I’ve started to do now without fail is to tip my shoes out before I put them on, just in case a spider is hiding in there. They like small dark spaces. I have a huge respect for nature and for spiders – I just never want to become their target ever again.

• As told to Elizabeth McCafferty

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