Many women and girls keep a hair tie handy by wearing it around their wrist when they are not using it.
Audree Kopp, a woman from Kentucky, had been wearing a sparkly hair tie on her wrist when she noticed a bump that became red, raised and continued to grow. First she was prescribed antibiotics, but the bump kept getting worse and she eventually ended up in an emergency room.
“I didn’t believe it at first, I thought that it was a spider bite, or something else, not from wearing hair-ties,” Kopp told WLKY News. “They said I needed surgery and thank God I caught it in time or I could have had sepsis.”
Doctors say the glittery hair tie Kopp had on her wrist was carrying a bacteria. The bacteria infected her arm through her pores and hair follicles – causing three types of 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 to the deeper layers of the skin,” said Dr. Amit Gupta Norton healthcare told WLKY.
Dr. Gupta says although this is rare, it is a good reminder.
“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,” said Gupta.
Kopp hopes others will learn from her story.
“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,” said Kopp.
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