I was never afraid of spiders until one tried to eat me.

Some years back, my daughter was looking for something in her closet when she let out an ear piercing scream and a desperate cry for help that had me ascending a flight of stairs in nanoseconds.

"THERE IS A GYNORMOUS SPIDER IN MY CLOSET" she wailed.

A spider? I thought that she had severed a limb.

I grabbed a tissue and told her to wait in the hallway. I have never been afraid of bugs. Snakes, yes, bugs, no.

"Mom, you're gonna need a towel, it's that big" she gestured, opening her hands to the size of a basketball.

I spent twenty minutes in the closet trying to find the damn spider and I could only conclude that she must have imagined it. Was it a twisted piece of yarn, a stray shoelace? I couldn't find anything but somehow I was able to convince her that the closet was free of that dreaded beast and that perhaps it had crawled back through the hole it came in.

Oh, the drama.

A few minutes later, I was in my bathroom tweezing in front of my magnifying mirror when I noticed a large piece of blurry fur on my tee shirt. (The magnifying mirror distorts images too far from it). When I stepped away to pick it off, I saw that it was an ugly, hairy-ass spider the SIZE OF A BASKETBALL.

I doubled my daughter's scream and then some. I managed to knock it off and put the wastebasket over it. It was way too big to step on. The crunch factor alone would have sent me into therapy. My daughter came running into my bathroom, thinking that I had severed a limb, to find me sitting on the overturned wastebasket.

"I caught him" I said triumphantly, but I also said hello to Arachnophobia.

A new research study in Austria is trying to rewrite the lyrics to this old rhyme. The University of Graz is on the hunt for girls who are fearful of spiders so they can examine how fear affects the processes of the brain . Their goal is to develop new phobia treatments."Spiders provoke revulsion for many people and even set off fearful panic. Girls in particular are frequently affected," the university said.

But for me, there is an upside of Arachnophobia...it curbed my tweezing.