Girlfriend bit by brown recluse and hospitalized for four days.. pics inside

This last September my girlfriend and I were at the airport on a Friday afternoon waiting on my sister to get in when my girlfriend felt a sharp pain on her ear. She asked me to look and see what was on it and I found this guy. Apparently it had been crawling around on her face for a few minutes (even going up next to to her eye, she thought it was just her hair) before it bit her. A few hours later her ear began blistering so we decided to go to an urgent care clinic and they told her to keep an eye on it and if the blistering gets worse go to the ER. Here she is after the trip to urgent care. The night goes on and her ear progressively gets worse and begins to swell, so we take off to the ER. They prescribe her pain medication and steroids to help with the swelling. We had killed the spider and kept it and luckily the doctor working the shift at the hospital knew quite a bit about spiders. He identified the spider as a premature female brown recluse. Here's a front and back view of her ear that night.

The next morning she came over looking like this and the swelling had begun to spread across the side of her face. Here's another picture she took that morning on her computer. That day it just kept getting worse until eventually that night her eye swelled shut. The next day her voice started to go hoarse and she was having difficulty swallowing because the swelling had started to go around her throat. We decided it was time to go back to the hospital. They admitted her and hooked her up to IV steroids to help the swelling. The swelling kept spreading across her face and eventually reached her other eye.

She spent 4 days in the hospital before they released her. Her face went back to normal within a few days, but the skin on her ear was dying. A few weeks later she went to see a plastic surgeon and he told her she needed an immediate skin graft or the skin on the ear would die and she would be missing half her ear.

So four days in the hospital, a skin graft, and a month of wearing a helmet and a headband after the surgery, she is finally back to normal. All of this from a little spider.

TL;DR - Girlfriend bit on ear by brown recluse has severe allergic reaction which starts to spread across her face and around her throat, hospitalized for 4 days then gets a skin graft a few weeks later. Pictures.

Edit: Forgot to add some closure. Her ear is doing great and is almost completely healed from the skin graft. She still has sensitivity problems when it gets cold but other than that it's back to normal.

Edit2: Wow, didn't expect this to be such a hit haha. Thank you for the kind words everyone, she will love reading these comments when she wakes up!

Ok to answer a few questions. We live in the Texas Panhandle. Some of the pictures look like the swelling is on the right side of her face, instead of the left, this is because she took those on her computer.

As for the hospital bills... I'm not sure how much the two ER visits and the four days came out to, but I know the skin graft was completely covered by her insurance. I'll have to ask her about the hospital bills when she wakes up.

The doctor at the hospital the first night told us that there is no "legal" (I think that's the word he used) antivenom in the US for brown recluse bites. The only thing she could do was take the steroids for inflammation, and ice the area. He told us the ice slows down the spread of the venom and helps protect the area from necrosis. She iced the area constantly for about a week but still developed necrosis.

Edit3: Here's a picture of her new ear. This was taken today, 3 months after the bite and about 2 months after the skin graft.