The remnants of the bag full of novelty jewellery pieces were turning up everywhere, this time it was on a towel in her laundry.

But this black creepy crawly captivating her puppy’s attention was no plastic spider.

It was the real thing and the pain it caused was excruciating – even life threatening.

‘’It was identical to the rings I’d been picking up all over the place, so I just bent down and picked it up,’’ Mrs Armstrong said.

‘’Never in my life have I felt such pain.

``It was the most unusual pain and it just went on and on and on.

‘’It didn’t matter what I was given for it, for the next 12 hours it just didn’t let up.’’

Mrs Armstrong ended up in Wollongong Hospital’s intensive care unit, being pumped with anti venom after the funnel web spider dug its fangs into her hand.

She had the presence of mind to throw a towel on the spider and scoop it into a plastic Smurf container – the only thing she could find with a lid.

‘’I trapped it and took it to the hospital and they identified it straight away,’’ she said.

‘’I must have seen that on TV or something, I knew it was bad because of the pain. I looked for a red back because that was the only spider I knew. I had no idea it was a funnel web.’’

Mrs Armstrong, who was getting ready to take her eight-year-old daughter Lake to school when she was bitten, headed straight to Kiama medical centre, armed with her spider.

She was taken to Shellharbour Hospital and then transferred to Wollongong’s ICU.

’’The ambulance officers put on the compression bandage and then I got the ant-venom, two bags of it it was very scary and would have been scary for Lake to watch,’’ she said.

‘’The ambulance officers said I was only the second person in 16 years to get a funnel web bite.

``They don’t usually bite, they live underground and for them to come out was quite unusual. It’s only the second time they’d seen it.’’