Audree Kopp from Kentucky came up with a lot of guesses for what was causing the mysterious bump on her arm. It was big and red, swollen to the size of a quarter, and no matter what she did it kept growing.
Kopp guessed that the bump must be from a spider bite, or some other kind of reaction, but the truth was much stranger. It turned out to be caused by something she wore on her wrist every day: one of the glittery hair-ties she wears, which she would put around her wrist when she wasn't using it.
It may seem like a silly thing to get sick from, but this tiny hair product put Kopp in a lot of danger.
While it started out small, the bump grew and grew every day. Even antibiotics prescribed by Kopp's doctor couldn't shrink it.
"It just kept getting bigger and redder and worse," Kopp told WLKY [Warning: they use some gross pictures of Kopp's wrist]. It turned out that bacteria and hair from Kopp's head had stuck on the hair-tie, then traveled into her sking through her pores.
This cause three seperate infections that her doctor had to surgically remove. If he hadn't, Kopp could have contracted Sepsis - blood poisoning - and fallen into a coma.
After everything she went through because of one little hair-tie, Kopp says she'll never wear one on her wrist again, and she's warning other women not to.
"Be careful," she says, "you can't put all these hair-ties around the wrist particularly because it can cause problems with the skin, it can cause infection."
