Man Nearly Dies After Nail Biting Habit Leads to Sepsis
If you’ve ever had children (or, indeed, been a child!), you know how easy it is to fall into poor personal habits. Picking your nose, forgetting to regularly wash your face, slipping on sneakers without socks — any of these unsavory practices probably make you grimace, particularly if you encountered them in adults.
But for one Birkdale, England, resident, his bad habit almost cost him his life. Twenty-eight-year-old Luke Hanoman had, for all intents and purposes, an orderly, blessed life.
The father of two was a gainfully employed warehouse operator living in northwest England. One day, though, he started feeling ill.
First, he felt hot and then cold before becoming wracked with shuddering shivers. He broke out in cold sweats, and after a week of fighting the symptoms, his mental clarity started to go.
“I thought I could just sleep it off,” Hanoman told the Daily Mirror. “I went to bed on Friday night and woke up at 2 p.m. the next day.”
His mother called emergency services as soon as she saw him, and the operator told Hanoman that he had 24 hours to make it to a hospital.
The urgency was warranted; unbeknown to the young father, he had sepsis.
A body-wide inflammatory reaction that occurs after an infection, sepsis is also sometimes referred to as blood poisoning. It kills tens of thousands in the United Kingdom every year.
The most surprising thing about Hanoman’s case was how he got the illness in the first place. See, he didn’t have an immune disorder and wasn’t bit by a wild animal.
Instead, he got sepsis by biting his fingernails. “I used to bite my nails all the time,” he said.
“And one day, I bit the skin down the side of my nail. It hurt a bit but I didn’t think anything of it.”
That bite was the beginning of a life-threatening ordeal that nearly put him into septic shock. Fortunately, after four days of round-the-clock care, Hanoman rallied, and he now hopes his brush with death will raise awareness of the dangers of sepsis.
“I had no idea what sepsis was, and I had no idea about the symptoms to look out for,” he recounted to The Sun. “I think it’s important people know that it can target anyone at any age.”
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