Queens woman ended up in medically induced coma after nose piercing caused infection

Dana Smith said, ‘I couldn’t hold water down. At some point I started to throw up blood’

A Queens woman ended up in a medically induced coma after her nose piercing caused an infection that forced her to get a liver transplant.

37-year-old Dana Smith was taken to hospital in late January with an unknown infection that doctors diagnosed as a rare type of liver failure that was connected to the $60 diamond stud in her nose, The New York Post reported.

Ms Smith told CBS New York that she had gotten the piercing on a whim during Thanksgiving and started feeling ill about a month later.

She said: “Stomach pain. I felt like I kind of lost appetite."

She said she couldn't eat or drink. She told WABC: "I was just drinking water, I couldn't hold the water down. I guess at some point I started to throw up blood."

Ms Smith added to CBS: “I didn’t want to go to the hospital with Covid going on. It got to the point where I felt like I didn’t have a choice.”

Read more: New Covid variant spreading rapidly in NYC

Doctors figured out that Ms Smith was suffering from a very rare form of liver failure.

Dr Lewis Teperman, the transplant director at the Sandra Atlas Center for Liver Disease at North Shore University Hospital, told CBS: “Fulminant liver failure is when you’re perfectly healthy, you acquire a virus, and within two months you fall into a coma."

Ms Smith was put into a medically induced coma and woke up after days had passed and was told that she had received a liver transplant.

She said: “I just thought I just had a stomach virus or just something with my stomach. I never would have thought that my liver was failing and there was a chance that I might not have been here today."

Her nose piercing was infected with hepatitis B. Dr Teperman added: “We couldn’t figure it out until all the tape was taken away from her nose and I said, ‘Look at that. When did you get that? It’s so tiny,’ and she then told us it was right at the end of Thanksgiving."

Dr Tepperman said that they were able to figure out what was wrong through the process of elimination. He told WABC: "This was the one unique change that had taken place in her life, this nose ring. And it's the perfect time for the virus to incubate."

Doctors say that they have seen a rise in liver failure and people fear coming into hospitals during the pandemic.

Dr Tepperman told CBS: “I think that has to do with people not coming to the hospital readily enough, early enough to get treated."

“Even with COVID going on, you should still go get checked out because you never know. That one decision saved my life," Ms Smith added.