College Student Racks Up $1 Million Medical Bill After Spider Bite

By Nina Golgowski, DAILY MAIL

Credit: � Facebook via Daily Mail

Ms Hefferan's knee is seen before it was stripped of dead tissue after a single spider bite hospitalized her during the course of over 20 surgeries.

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    Jane Hefferan is seen during her recovery after a brown recluse spider bit her leg requiring over 20 surgeries that cut dead tissue away straight to the bone.

    (� Facebook via Daily Mail)

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October 4, 2012 Updated Oct 4, 2012 at 10:05 AM PDT

After four years, over $1 million in medical costs and dozens of blood transfusions and skin grafts, a Michigan woman says she has recovered from not only one but two rare spider bites that nearly cost her her leg.

Bedridden and warned of potentially losing her leg, Jane Hefferan of Dearborn, Michigan said she would have never guessed that a single spider bite would end the way it did, but neither did her doctors.

'It was eating up so much of my leg, and so much of my tissue was gone,' Ms Hefferan who had just graduated from Vanderbilt University when first bitten told Click on Detroit. 'At that point there was like nothing left of my leg. It was just basically bone.'

It was in the summer of 2008 after graduating from law school that doctors believe a poisonous brown recluse spider crawled into her bed in Nashville - how experts say 38 per cent of brown recluse bites occur.

Primarily known throughout parts of the southeast, though capable of spreading elsewhere, the spider's bite immediately puffed up her knee but she shoved it off as related to a previous running injury than something far more serious.

It was her physical therapist who realized it was something more. ''The physical therapist looked at it and he's like, "You need to go to the emergency room,'' she said.

'I immediately said that no, it wasn't a spider bite. It couldn't possibly be. I had no idea that a spider could do something like that,' she said.

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