Woman Says Wearing Glitter Hair Tie on Wrist Caused Infection, Emergency Surgery

A Kentucky woman says she acquired a painful infection partly due to wearing a hair tie on her wrist.

Doctors suspect that bacteria from a glittery hair tie got under Audree Kopp’s wrist through her pores and hair follicles last week, causing three types of infections, WLKY reports.

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

Kopp said that she noticed a growing bump on her wrist nearly two weeks ago that kept getting “bigger and redder and worse.”

She went to her doctor who initially put her on antibiotics, Fox reports, but the bump continued to grow.

“They said I needed surgery, and thank God I caught it in time, or I could have had sepsis,” she told WLKY.

Dr. Amit Gupta at Norton Healthcare told the station that he had to make an incision and drain the fluid from an abscess on the back of Kopp’s wrist.

“Be careful,” Gupta warned. “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.”

Kopp added that, had she not caught the infection early on 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 and it could have been way worse.”

She documented the experience through several Facebook posts and photos, showing her wound from when it began as a small bump to a healing incision on her wrist – she noted in one post that she had “3 bacterias …. strep, staph, AND poly negative.”

“I want to inform everyone to make sure no one else has to go thru this,” Kopp wrote in one post. “The GLITTER tie is the one that caused the issue.”

“Please share this, because I’m pretty sure about 90% of us females don’t think twice about keeping hair-ties on our wrists. (Obviously I won’t be doing it anymore.)”

This article originally appeared on People.com