Unlike Popeye, I do not endorse canned veg.

I referred in a previous post to a mysterious bite which caused my forearm to swell up and make me look like Popeye. Well, the swelling is gone now but my arm is weaker than before.

My interest piqued, I began Googling around to see if the bite may have somehow caused a degeneration of muscle tissue in my arm, whereupon I found many instances of this lovely word: envenomation, which according to dictionary.com is “The injection of a poisonous material by sting, spine, bite, or other similar means.”

Local and systemic skeletal muscle degeneration is a common consequence of envenomations due to snakebites and mass bee attacks. Phospholipases A2 (PLA2) are important myotoxic components in these venoms, inducing a similar pattern of degenerative events in muscle cells. Myotoxic PLA2s bind to acceptors in the plasma membrane, which might be lipids or proteins and which may differ in their affinity for the PLA2s. Upon binding, myotoxic PLA2s disrupt the integrity of the plasma membrane by catalytically dependent or independent mechanisms, provoking a pronounced Ca2+ influx which, in turn, initiates a complex series of degenerative events associated with hypercontraction, activation of calpains and cytosolic Ca2+-dependent PLA2s, and mitochondrial Ca2+ overload.

So maybe it is possible that the bite is to blame for my “muscle necrosis”. The above quote is from an article at Science Direct.