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Wearing Hair Ties On Wrist Leads To Severe Infection

A seemingly mundane act of carrying a hair tie on her wrist may have caused a Kentucky woman to develop an infection so severe that surgery was necessary to prevent sepsis.

Audree Kopp first noticed a bump on her wrist but didn’t think it was anything more concerning than a spider bite, reports Cosmopolitan.

I didn’t believe it at first. I thought that it was a spider bite, or something else, not from wearing hair ties.

As time went on, Kopp said the bump did not go away but rather grew and became redder.

It just kept getting bigger, and redder, and worse.

She decided to get medical attention and was prescribed antibiotics but the medication did not stop the growth of the bump.

At this point, she was told that she needed surgery to drain the abscess in order to prevent sepsis. Dr. Amit Gupta performed the procedure on Kopp and offered a warning to be careful about using your wrist to store hair ties.

Be careful. I mean, you can’t put all these hair ties around the wrist particularly because it can cause problems to the skin, it can cause infection.

People reports that Kopp acknowledges that catching the infection as early as she did was key to being able to clear the infection with minimal problems. If the infection had been given more time to spread, it could have caused much worse complications.

Once it gets into your bloodstream, people have been known to go into a coma, your body shuts down and it could have been way worse.

Kopp has figured out that a glittery hair tie was most likely the cause of the infection. Dr. Gupta believes that the bacteria was able to migrate from the hair tie under her skin through her pores and hair follicles.

The easiest solution to this problem is to never put hair ties around your wrist. If you are going to, however, a few rules that will help reduce the chances of complications are to be sure that the hair tie is loose, clean and removed from the wrist frequently.

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