Woman nearly lost arm after black widow spider bite Mrs Coombs has spent six weeks in hospital and is now awaiting for the infection to leave her body before she can have her tendons rebuilt after they were left paralysed by the toxic. Mrs Coombs, a former medical photographer from Lytchett Matravers, near Poole, Dorset, said: "I have been terrified of spiders all my life. People tell you it's such a silly phobia and they can't hurt you, but now I know that they can. For a while the doctors were worried that I may even lose the hand completely and I had to sign for amputation every time I went under anaesthetic. Every time the surgeons operated they found more and more decay, they just kept taking away the dead flesh. They found a lot of necrotised flesh and every time I woke up I made sure my hand was still there. For the first week I felt very poorly and had a very high temperature and felt like I had a really bad case of the flu. The pain in my hand was so awful and they operated three times in seven or eight days. At the moment it feels like it's never going to end. I think I would have died if it had gone untreated. Cellulitis when it gets going can be nasty and there was no question of not treating it. I couldn't believe it until I looked it up on the internet, I just thought 'this is England for goodness sake. False widow spiders - Steatoda nobilis in Latin - are no bigger than a 20p piece but they have the worst bite out of every spider species in the UK. They have a dark, shiny body with pale markings and cream band on their abdomen and are usually found in outbuildings. They tend to be found more commonly in southern England and experts believe they arrived from the Canary Islands more than 100 years ago. It is thought they are now spreading further across the country due to climate change. They only bite when provoked and tend to cause humans a bee sting-style reaction, but some people can react far worse to it. In February, father Chris Galton, 31, collapsed after being bitten 10 times by a false widow on the neck and back in Southampton. He was taken to hospital and released after being given painkillers. Dr Tom McKinstry, of the British Medical Association, said people can die from a false widow bite but only if they suffer a severe allergic reaction and don't get treated. He said: "The venom makes you pretty ill for 12 to 14 hours. It's really bad if Catherine's had that sort of reaction, and very worrying. Any degree of toxicity can affect kidneys and liver with poison, but I'm not sure that happens with this spider.