Woman claims she was poisoned by napkin left on her car door handle

‘I started getting hot flashes, my chest was hurting, my heart was beating really fast’

A woman ended up in hospital after an allegedly poisoned napkin was left on her car door handle, with doctors suggesting the incident could have been a part of an attempted kidnapping.

Erin Mims, of Houston, Texas, had visited a restaurant for her birthday with her husband on Tuesday when she saw the napkin on the handle.

Speaking in a video posted to Facebook, Ms Mims noted that she’s a “germophobe” and normally wouldn’t have grabbed the napkin, but that she thought her husband could have placed it there.

“When my husband got off the phone, I asked him, ‘did you put a napkin in my door?’ and he was like ‘no’. Immediately, I started looking for the hand sanitiser,” she said.

“I went inside, washed my hands, and maybe like two minutes later my fingertips started tingling,” she added.

“After five minutes, my whole arm started tingling, then it starts to feel numb, I got lightheaded, I felt like I couldn’t breathe, it got hot. It was just a whole bunch of different feelings at one time. I started to panic,” Ms Mims said.

Erin Mims says she was poisoned by a napkin left on her car door handle (Screenshot / NBC News)

Her husband took her to a hospital where several tests were conducted.

“I was there for about six and a half hours,” an emotional Ms Mims recounted. “The doctor said I had acute poisoning from an unknown substance. I didn’t have enough of it in my system to determine what it was, but just that little amount had me messed up.”

“So just imagine if I would’ve wrapped it with my whole hand, I probably could’ve been dead,” she added.

The physician said the napkin could have been a part of a kidnapping plan, according to Ms Mims.

“What started out as a great day, turned out to be one of the scariest moments of my life,” she said.

“All I could do was think about my babies,” she told Fox26.

The Houston Police Department said that the incident is the first of its kind that they’ve seen, according to the local station.

“The probability is that you would have to have a lot more than just a casual exposure,” Southeast Houston Poison Center expert Mark Winter told Fox26. “In her video, her symptoms match hundreds of different poisons. It is possible. I’ve learned over my 40 years, that anything is possible when it comes to the human body.”

“My whole arm started tingling and feeling numb. I couldn’t breathe,” Ms Mims told the outlet. “I started getting hot flashes, my chest was hurting, my heart was beating really fast.”

Some of the comments on Ms Mims’s Facebook post suggested that she may have had a panic attack and wasn’t poisoned.

“I read some of the comments. I don’t care what people think,” Ms Mims told Fox. “I just want them to know what happened. When they see that napkin, in their head they’re going to know not to touch it. I just want everybody to be careful. Physically, I’m okay, but emotionally, mentally, I’m not. I don’t even want to go anywhere by myself.”