Hands in the air; who keeps a spare hair tie on their wrist for when you just need to pull your hair back into a ponytail (which, to us mums, is pretty much 25 000 times a day)?
I know, we’re totally guilty of this too. The problem? It can actually end up killing us. And we’re not even joking.
To American Audree Kopp, this hair tie habit almost ended up having disastrous consequences.
A couple of weeks ago Kopp noticed a red swelling on her wrist, which she initially put down to a spider bite. But when the bump continued to grow and get more and more red, she decided to seek medical attention. When not even antibiotics could bring the swelling down, the young Kentucky-native took herself of to a nearby hospital.
“They said I needed surgery, and thank God I caught it in time, or I could have had sepsis,” Kopp told a local news station.
The reason for the infection? According to the doctors who treated her, the most probable cause of the abscess was bacteria from Audree’s glittery hair band, which she tended to keep on her writst.
“There is a lot of bacteria to be found on the scalp and in hair – and that bacteria managed to work its way under her skin through pores and hair follicles in her wrist, resulting in three different types of infection,” says Dr. Amit Gupta at Norton Healthcare. “She had a large abscess on the back of her wrist, so I basically made an incision and drained the pus all the way down.”
Needless to say, Kopp won’t be wearing her hair tie anywhere but her hair in the future.
“It could have been a whole different ball game, once [the infection] gets into your bloodstream, people have been known to go into a coma, your body shuts down it could have been way worse,” she said.
The doctors who treated her are quick to offer some words of warning too:
“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,” warns Gupta. “And if you’ve got a ponytail-wearing child who likes to wear hairbands around his or her wrist, you might want to issue a word of warning … and wash everyone’s hairbands periodically, as you would any other item of clothing.”
Parents also warned over Loombands
Much like hair ties can clearly pose a risk, parents are also being urged to make sure their children, if playing with the very popular Loombands, don’t wrap one of the rubber bands around their wrists or fingers.
This is exactly what eight-year-old Brandon Lambert from North Yorkshire had done, and nearly ended up loosing two fingers as a result. When father Mark when to check on his son a little while after he had gone to bed, he found him with several LoomBands wrapped around his hand, and two of the child’s fingers actually starting to turn black.
“LoomBands are marketed as a fun and safe product but I don’t think they are,” Mark says to the Daily Mail. “They are like elastic bands, and elastic bands are not child-friendly. They can be very dangerous.’
The furious dad posted a picture of his sons fingers to his Facebook page to draw attention to the danger of what had happened.
Yikes. Do YOU often wear your hair band around your wrist? Or have YOU got kids who play with LoomBands? Join the conversation on Twitter with us at @Herfamilydotie
