Love Bites Unsightly and Now Unhealthy
Teens have heard it a million times – hickeys are ugly. Now parents have more arsenal against the love-sucking bruise – hickeys are a hazard to your health and can cause strokes.
A 44-year old New Zealand woman found this out after suffering a mild stroke while watching TV. At Emergency, doctors were puzzled as to the cause after confirming it was indeed a stroke. Eventually, they found a hickey on her neck and for the first time in the history of medicine they saw proof of a hickey being the cause.
“Because it was a love bite there would be a lot of suction,” attending physician Dr. Teddy Wu told the Christchurch Press. “Because of the physical trauma it had made a bit of bruising inside the vessel. There was a clot in the artery underneath where the hickey was.”
The clot got loose and traveled to the woman’s heart causing a mild stroke and temporary paralysis in her arm. As far as the doctors can tell from medical literature nothing like this has happened before.
The woman is recovering well after receiving an anti-coagulant.
