A woman has spoken out about how something a lot of us will do caused her to have a medical emergency.
Gabi Amoils, 23, shared her “traumatising” experience after developing a severe infection in her finger, which she initially dismissed as a minor issue.
Amoils, a long-time nail picker, noticed pain in her finger two days after picking at her nail earlier this year. The discomfort quickly escalated.
“I remember me and my friends were playing Twister and I couldn’t even put my hand on the spot,” she told news.com.au. “It was so sore.”
Despite the increasing pain, she hesitated to see a doctor and instead attempted home remedies, such as soaking her finger in boiled salt water. However, her condition did not improve.
By the fifth day, the pain had become unbearable, prompting her to seek medical attention.
Doctors diagnosed her with paronychia, a common nail infection that she had experienced seven months earlier. At that time, a course of antibiotics had successfully cleared the infection, so she was prescribed the same treatment.
@maccyandcheese Traumatising to say the least #er ♬ original sound – Mac and cheese
“I thought, OK, it will just go away like last time. But she told me to keep taking photos of it to monitor my finger,” Amoils said.
However, over the weekend, her condition worsened significantly.
“It doubled in size. It was so painful and so bad,” she recalled.
On her lunch break, she returned to the doctor, who informed her that the infection required treatment at a hospital emergency department, as the clinic lacked the necessary tools for the procedure.
“At the doctor, she basically did the same thing as the emergency room. We soaked my finger in hot water for 15 minutes to soften it,” she said.
“But this particular doctor’s office didn’t have the utensils to cut it open, so we kept trying to poke it with a needle to get it to burst.”
At the hospital, medical staff performed the same soaking process but had the appropriate tools to cut open the infected area and drain the pus.
“I didn’t smell it, but the doctor said it had the most foul smell because it had been brewing in there for over a week,” she said. “Two millimetres of pus came out.”
Now, a month after the ordeal, Amoils said her finger has mostly healed, though some minor skin damage remains.
“It took about two weeks for it to heal,” she said.
She documented her experience on social media, intending only to update her friends, but the video unexpectedly went viral, amassing 3.8 million views.
“The main comment that I get is, ‘Shame, that looks so painful. I’ve had it before, I hope you’re recovering well’,” she said.
“The second option is ‘This is not an emergency’ and the third is advice on how to fix it.”
Amoils clarified that she did not voluntarily seek emergency treatment but followed her doctor’s recommendation.
It was her first visit to an emergency department, and she only went because her GP deemed it necessary.
