DARGAVILLE, New Zealand, May 14 (UPI) -- A Canadian man who fell asleep nude on a New Zealand beach spent 16 days in a hospital after a spider bit him on the penis, a doctor said.
Dr. Nigel Harrison, who treated the 22-year-old man at Dargaville Hospital, said the victim fell asleep on a beach near Dargaville after skinny dipping and woke up to find "his penis swollen and painful, with a red mark on the shaft suggestive of a bite," Britain's The Daily Telegraph reported Friday.
"He rapidly developed generalized muscle pains, fever, headache, photophobia (light sensitivity) and vomiting," Harrison wrote in the New Zealand Medical Journal.
"It was a rather nasty, ill-placed bite," he wrote.
Harrison said the bite was identified as coming from a katipo, a rare spider related to the black widow. He said anti-venom was administered, but the man spent a total of 16 days in the hospital due to heart inflammation resulting from the incident.
Harrison said it was the first known incidence of heart inflammation resulting from a katipo bite.
The doctor said the patient has since returned to Canada.
"On review he was generally well," Harrison wrote.
