So began the longest and most terrifying two hours of Mr Wheatley's life: the bite detonated a storm inside his nervous system, one which sent his heart into overdrive, doubled his blood pressure, unleashed wavelets of violent, involuntary twitches over his arms, stood his body hair on end and caused his lungs to stiffen and well with yellow foam. But the events of that dramatic night 25 years ago did not end with an agonising death. Instead, Mr Wheatley made medical history, becoming the first human to receive an experimental antidote to the ferocious Atrax robustus, the Sydney funnel-web.

His survival ended a reign of terror in the city's gardens, in which the world's most venomous spider killed 13 NSW citizens, many of them children. Indeed, the last fatality occurred exactly 12 months earlier when a curly-headed blond toddler, James Cully, was bitten while on holidays on the Central Coast. Mr Wheatley, however, was lucky from the word go. His neighbour, a GP, was not only home but awake on that fateful night and raced over to wrap his foot in a compression bandage, at the time a new first aid response. "I don't remember much after getting into the car but I do remember saying to my son that he should slow down," says Mr Wheatley. "The last thing I heard was our next-door neighbour say, 'No, just go like hell.' It was then I knew how serious it was." They made it to Ryde Hospital inside 15 minutes. Sweating rivers, Mr Wheatley was complaining of palpitations but soon registered a pulse rate of 100 beats a minute. As doctors set up an intravenous line, they noted the twitching in his arms was progressing to muscle spasm.

Tears and saliva began to pour out of his body, his complexion turned blue and his lungs began to well with froth: "I was drowning in my own fluids." As he thrashed for oxygen in desperation, he pulled out his intravenous line and couldn't keep an oxygen mask on. A decision was made to sedate, paralyse and rush him by ambulance to Royal North Shore Hospital where, by another stroke of luck, Dr Malcolm Fisher - now a professor and a world-renowned intensive-care specialist - was on duty. Gwen Wheatley, who was following in a car, remembers seeing the ambulance tear past but says she still had not registered just how close she was to losing her husband: "As soon as I got to hospital, I had to give all this information and was thinking, 'This is strange. Why can't I see him?' Then Dr Fisher explained there was an anti-venom and that Gordon may be the first [human] patient to receive it. They needed my permission … They didn't know what side effects there might be.

"I asked him, 'What would you do?' and he said, 'I'd use it.' " Minutes later Mr Wheatley - whose heart rate was now 155 beats a minute - was injected with the first ampoule. Nothing happened.

A second was injected minutes later and a desperate third, too. At 1.30am and in utter frustration, Dr Fisher - famous even then for his earthy language - rang the Melbourne home of Dr Struan Sutherland, the biggest hero in the spider-men story.

The world-renowned venom expert and research scientist had devoted a frustrating 15 years of his life in the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories working on a funnel-web anti-venom. With the help of the Worrell family and its Gosford reptile park - who devised a technique to milk spiders for their venom - he experimented day and night, often battling an unhelpful bureaucracy and funding cuts. It was not until July 1980, just six months before Mr Wheatley was bitten, that Dr Sutherland proved his antivenom reversed poisoning in monkeys, the only other mammal affected by funnel-web venom. That October the Medical Journal of Australia published three papers on the venom, the antivenom and bite treatments, and the first batch of the antivenom was approved for manufacture and clinical trial just 30 days before Mr Wheatley was bitten. Dr Fisher remembers that night clearly: "Struan reckoned my words were, 'I've given him three ampoules of the stuff … It hasn't killed him but it hasn't done him any good either,' " he told the Herald.

"I actually said, 'This f---ing stuff doesn't f---ing work.' Struan answered that if it hadn't killed him to just give him some more because we just didn't know how much he might need." An elated Fisher was soon back on the phone to Sutherland: "I gave him another and he was better in an hour. I said to Struan, 'You've ruined a beautiful bloody syndrome.'

"Later we took the tube out, kept him overnight and he went home the next day." The doctors' actions appear brutal in retrospect but the truth is, in the early days of what is now the high-tech intensive-care specialty, treatment was often experimental, risky and provided under extenuating, last-ditch circumstances. Medical leaps were made simply trying and testing new techniques to sustain the human body through the worst of dire illnesses or trauma. If they worked they would be written up and applied again and again.

That night a confluence of science and pioneering medical techniques hit paydirt. A systematic review of data published in February by the Medical Journal of Australia identified 198 cases in which potential funnel-web spider bites were documented. It found no confirmed deaths after the antivenom was introduced and a complete reversal of severe poisoning in 97 per cent of cases.

After his brush with death, the Wheatleys spent another 1½ years in Sydney before retiring to the South Coast. "I rang Struan just a couple of years before he died," said Mr Wheatley. "It had been 20 years and I said, 'Hello, it's Gordon Wheatley.' Without a pause, he said, 'Well how the bloody hell are you?' "