Warning: If you're feeling fragile this Monday morning, you might want to give this story a miss. Similarly, if you're the type of girl that keeps a hair tie/bobble around your wrist at all times for safe keeping/laziness/to deal with bad hair days, this story might make you wish to remove said bobble immediately and throw it in the trash.
Kentucky woman Audree Kopp recently developed an infection so serious she had to have surgery - and it was all from wearing a hair tie on her wrist. Kopp noticed that a tender bump had started growing on her right wrist, where she wore the hair tie. Over time, it started to get bigger and bigger, and more swollen, and even after a trip to the doctors, antiobiotics couldn't rid her of the bump.
Kopp then visited ER when the bump got more painful, and had to have emergency surgery to drain the swelling abcess - and doctors warned her that the infection was so severe, it could have been a killer.
See, what had happened was that Kopp's scratchy and glittery hair ties had been collected pathogens in the fabric, and when they aggravated her skin and hair follicles, they transferred those pathogens to her blood stream, which led to three serious bacterial infections. Left untreated, this infection could have become sepsis, a life-threatening inflammatory condition that can lead to organ failure.
'You can't put all these hair ties around the wrist, because it can cause problems with the skin,' Amit Gupta, the surgeon who worked on Kopp, told news station WLKY. 'It can cause infection.'
Kopp added: 'It could have been a whole different ballgame. Once it gets into your bloodstream people are known to go into a coma, your body shuts down. It could have been way worse.'
But if you can't quit your hair tie habit, doctors advise wearing bobbles loosely around your wrist and cleaning them regularly.
Should you want to watch a more detailed analysis of the whole gnarly affair, here's a video:
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.