Missouri Mother Warns Parents to be Aware of Hair Strands Cutting Off Babies’ Circulation; Condition Called Hair Tourniquet

A Missouri mother is warning parents to be aware of hair strands wrapping around babies’ toes and cutting off their circulation.

Babies can get in just about anything, and parents always have to be on their toes watching over their little ones. A Missouri mother was in the shock of her life when she realized her 5-month-old baby was getting their circulation cut off from their toe by a strand of hair.

Last month, 33-yer-old Sara Ward noticed a line going across the middle of her infant son’s right foot. At the time, it didn’t seem to be anything severe. “It wasn’t looking alarming at that point and we figured maybe it had just got a little bit irritated by something,” the mom recalled in an interview,” said Ward. However, after a few days passed, she noticed the baby’s toe had swollen up and turned purple. That’s when they immediately rushed him to their pediatrician.

It turned out to be a syndrome called hair tourniquet, which is a “rare clinical phenomenon that involves hair, thread, or similar material becoming so tightly wrapped around an appendage that it results in injury,” the New York Post reports.

The strand of hair got so tightly wrapped that the doctors were worried they’d have to resort to surgery. They spent a good 40 minutes or so trying to get the hair and they had all these different tools that they were using — tweezers, magnifying goggles and special lights,” Ward explained, according to the New York Post. “The toe was very painful for my son so he was crying and kicking and couldn’t keep still as they were trying to get a better look at it.” She added, “They tried hair removal cream to try and break down the hair pieces and some numbing cream to get deeper with tweezers.”

After successfully removing the strand, the boy was kept overnight, and his toe eventually returned back to normal. After sharing her story, her posts were lit up with thousands of responses and similar explaining experiences. “We have a furry cat, and man, the amount of fur that gets wrapped around our little one’s fingers and toes are insane,” one user wrote, per the New York Post.

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