Carla McPhie, 21, left home to attend college. Lived off campus with a childhood friend. Like so many other college students, she was looking to find out who she was and what life had in store for her. She and her friend were ‘spreading their wings and trying new things’ like so many college students do.

In her last year at college, Carla began getting headaches which kept getting more and more intense. On one occasion, she had a terrific headache, so she took some pain meds and went to bed, but when she woke up, she had a pounding headache. Two days later, the headache was still present and getting worse, making it difficult for her to concentrate on her school work so she went home early.

Carla stayed home the next day and was sitting on the couch watching television with a friend, when she noticed that a certain commercial made her head feel ‘funny’. She started hearing multiple songs that she knew, but could not decipher what it was. She described it as something like an audible hallucination. She went upstairs to her roommate, who noticed that Carla’s head was twitching to the left.

Carla told her roommate that she felt like she was going to die, so the roommate called 9-1-1. While on the phone, she told the operator that she was 19, even though she knew she was 21 but no matter how hard she tried to tell the operator she was 21, it kept coming out 19. Then her body began shaking and her eyes rolled up so that only the white of the eye showed. Paramedics rushed her to the nearest hospital and her parents were called.

While in the hospital, she had what was diagnosed as a grand mal seizure. The doctors wanted to perform a CT-scan, but since it was a Friday evening, it had to wait, so they gave her anti-seizure medication and her parents took her home, intending on taking her to a neurologist on Monday.

At home, Carla felt worse and her parents rushed her to their local hospital where she was placed on a morphine drip and given a CT scan. The scan revealed a marble-sized mass in her brain, which the doctors believed could be cancer, news that devastated her parents.

Being the McPhie family lived in Canada, Carla was transferred to a hospital in Toronto that specialized in brain surgery. While awaiting brain surgery, the doctors at the hospital put her on anti-seizure medication and a morphine drip, but the morphine was not enough to stop her intense pain. She described it at the time as feeling as if her brain was going to explode. After complaining of the pain, the morphine drip is increased and Carla eventually got off to sleep.

When Carla’s parents told the attending nurse that Carla was finally in a deep sleep, she immediately went in to check on Carla, but was unable to rouse her. She checked Carla’s vital signs and immediately called a Code Blue emergency because she wasn’t breathing. Her parents thought they had just lost their daughter.

That’s when the doctor’s told her parents Carla’s brain had swollen to the point that it was pushing down into the brain stem and her pupils were blown, meaning they were dilated and unresponsive to any light. Then the doctor told them that there was a good chance that Carla was going to die.

Carla was then rushed into emergency surgery to reduce the swelling of the brain. Her parents didn’t know if they would ever see their daughter alive again or not and if she did live, would there be brain damage and how severe would that damage be?

When the surgeon opened up Carla’s skull and found the area where the mass was, they didn’t find cancer, but instead they found a puss filled abscess that was indicative of a severe infection. Brain abscesses often rupture causing death in over 80% of the cases. The prognosis of Carla McPhie was looking grimmer by the moment.

The doctors drained some of the puss from the infected area and sent it to the lab for analysis. The results showed that Carla had an infection of Streptococcus milleri, the same bacterium that is commonly found in the mouth and intestinal tract and which causes strep throat. Somehow, the bacteria had managed to move from her mouth to her brain. She was placed on a strong regimen of anti-biotics, which helped Carla recover, but not after another 3-weeks of battling the nearly fatal infection.

As it turned out, 10-months earlier, Carla went to visit a friend who was studying in France. One day, on a whim, she decided to get her tongue pierced. Doctors are certain that the bacteria had entered her blood stream as direct result of the tongue piercing and then made their way to her brain. She no longer has the piercing.

When you look at society today, tattoos and piercings, including tongue piercings, are becoming more common. According to the narrator of the Monsters Inside Me episode that featured Carla’s story, 36% of college-age males and 62% of college-age females have body piercings.

While the instances of infections like Carla’s are not common, they are growing in frequency as more and more people get piercings.

Remember, the tongue is a harbinger of many types of bacteria and whenever you run a needle through the tongue for a piercing, there is always that chance of the needle dragging various bacteria, such as Streptococcus milleri into the tongue tissue and into the bloodstream. That bacteria can end up in the brain or anywhere else in the body, causing serious and even life threatening infections. In Carla McPhie’s case, her tongue piercing nearly cost her her life. Let this be a warning to all!