Woman’s Wrist Practically Exploded From The Most Unlikely Common Item

Amanda Shea

Audree Kopp (left), Her wrist after being cut open (right)

After moving into her new home, Audree Kopp from Kentucky noticed a strange lump on her wrist. The healthy young woman passed it off as one of the pitfalls of hauling your stuff in and out during the process of moving. When the lump continued to grown and became increasingly more red and painful, Kopp sought immediate medical attention. That’s when doctors traced it back to one unexpected item that’s all to common among women and girls.

Kopp thanks God for getting to the doctor in time after she let this growth fester for too long, assuming it was nothing. By the time she got the attention it needed, she had to undergo emergency surgery for a bacterial infection that could have transpired into sepsis, which is fatal if left untreated.

Physicians drained an immense amount of pus from the woman’s wrist that had been accumulating because of bacteria caused by the most unlikely item. Kopp is like most women and girls and keeps a hair tie around her wrist, for quick access to tie her hair back when she needs it. That completely normal habit nearly cost the woman her life or at least limb, because of a particularly pretty elastic she wore that now needs to come with a warning.

Kopps’ swollen wrist (left), Glittery hair elastics that caused her problems (right)

According to WKLY News Louisville, the source of Kopp’s problems came from a glittery pink hair tie that Dr. Amit Gupta, who treated Kopp, said contained bacteria that got into his patient’s arm through her pores and hair follicles. Once the bacteria was in her body, it wreaked havoc, transpiring into not just one infection, but three different types on the woman’s wrist.

“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 the news station. Not all elastics are necessarily at risk of causing such adverse issues, mostly the ones like this flat band glitter type that are more difficult to keep clean.

Many women and girls don’t wash their hairbands, but if you’re going to keep them on your wrist, you may want to consider throwing them in the laundry from time to time. As for Kopp, she’s not chancing another trip to the ER and plans to keep elastics off her wrist. As with anything, if something doesn’t seem right, seek help. In this case, Kopp got a little too close to something far worse than needed, because she assumed a huge, growing red lump on her body was nothing to look into.

h/t: [OpposingViews]