The 78-year-old Coolongolook resident was simply brushing away the cobwebs that had accumulated on the flat tyre of his ride-on mower.

That was at 5pm.

Not having seen a spider or felt any pain, he happily inflated the tyre and went about mowing his lawn.

By 6:30pm, however, he was feeling an intense and mysterious pain in his left ring finger.

A shower eased the pain a little, but the intensity soon returned.

“I’ve never had pain like it,” Mr McDean recalled.

“It was 10 out of 10.”

Unable to sleep, Mr McDean made the decision to go to Manning Hospital at 10pm.

Once there, the cause of his pain was diagnosed as a redback spider bite because his ring finger was red and sweaty, while the rest of his hand was normal.

He was given a panadeine forte and two endones before being sent home, a little confused as to why he hadn't been given an anti-venom shot.

It turns out anti-venom shots are rarely used for the treatment of redback spider bites anymore.

The NSW Poisons Information Centre advises "routine use of antivenom is no longer recommended as recent trials show antivenom has a low response rate little better than placebo, and any effect is less than might be achieved with standard pain relief."

But that didn't make things any easier for Mr McDean.

Back at home, he still couldn’t sleep because of the pain and, following the doctor’s instructions, took another two endones at 4am.

He finally went to sleep around 5am, and when he woke a few hours later, the pain had lessened.

But it wasn’t until he vomited that afternoon that he started to feel significantly better.

Asked if there was a moral to the story, Mr McDean advised others to be careful around spider webs.

“Spiders never worried me before,” he said.

“But that pain was beyond putting up with.”