A Louisville, Kentucky, woman was terrified to discover that an item she put in her hair, a very common item, caused a life-threatening infection on her wrist.
Audrey Kopp told WLKY that she was moving into a new home when she first noticed a bump on her wrist.
“It just kept getting bigger and redder and worse,” she said. The woman went to her doctor, who prescribed antibiotics for the bump. Despite the medication, the bump continued to get worse until she finally decided to undergo surgery.
“They said I needed surgery, and thank God I caught it in time, or I could have had sepsis,” Kopp said.
As it turned out, bacteria from a hair tie she wore on her wrist got into her pores and hair follicles and caused a severe infection.
“She had a large abscess on the back of her wrist, so I basically made an incision and drained the puss all the way down,” Dr. Amit Gupta said.
Kopp said that she didn’t believe the cause of the infection at first, saying that she thought it was a “spider bite, or something else, not from wearing hair-ties.”
The woman said she made the decision not to wear hair ties on her wrist anymore after the terrifying ordeal.
“Be careful, you can’t put all these hair-ties around the wrist particularly because it can cause problems with the skin, it can cause infection,” she said. “It could have been a whole different ballgame, once it gets into your bloodstream, people have been known to go into a coma, your body shuts down it could have been way worse.”
Many readers expressed shock over the woman’s scary situation.
“Never would have thought that would happen,” one Mad World News reader commented on the site’s Facebook page.
“Glad you caught it in time,” another wrote.
“This is a must read for girls it might save your life,” another added.
In a similar incident, a 24-year-old mother died from a flesh-eating disease she contracted after an injury during a “sex game.”
Katie Widdowson injured her wrist during sex with her partner, Dean, and contracted necrotising fasciitis, a flesh-eating disease that took her life.
“[Katie and Dean] had been at a New Year’s Eve party until 5am on New Year’s Day,” Katie’s mother, Patricia, told The Sun.
“They’d got home around 6am and they’d had sex and she was tied up. They were a loving couple and it’s nobody’s else’s business what they did behind closed doors. Later that day Katie sent Dean a photo of her wrist saying it was hurting. The next night her arm looked horrific. Dean took a picture of it while the ambulance was on its way. There is a black mark on the base of her thumb and we think that is where the injury started.”
The mother said that she believed her daughter died because the hospital ignored her injury and the red flags that were apparent.
Widdowson reportedly suffered a heart attack while in the ambulance on the way to the hospital in Birmingham, England, and died early the next morning.