NEED TO KNOW
- Kara Marie was getting off the couch when her cat jumped up and scratched her finger
- The scratch became infected, and she later went to the emergency room
- She created a TikTok video about it, which amassed 5.5 million views
Kara Marie was having trouble falling asleep, so she moved to the living room couch to see if a change of scenery might help.
After dozing off, she woke up Friday morning to the sound of her cat scratching the litter box at 5 a.m., a sign that it was time to start her day. However, as she moved to get off the couch, her cat, Sponge, decided to jump on the sofa at the same time.
“As I put my hand on the couch to roll over, he jumped up, and his claw went directly in between, like my nail and like the fold of my skin,” Marie, 35, tells PEOPLE exclusively. “I have, like, a weird gut instinct about a lot of things. Unfortunately, I knew the minute his nail banger my skin, I thought, ‘Oh, this is going to be a problem.’ ”
With a bad feeling in her gut, Marie got up and washed her hands immediately. She noticed the area she had been scratched didn’t bleed. She wouldn’t find out until later that you actually want the site to draw blood, so it pushes out any infection.
Still, she put antibiotic ointment on the small wound and covered it with a Band-Aid. She felt fine all weekend, but it wasn’t until Monday that she started experiencing pain in her finger. She contacted her doctor, who started her on a round of antibiotics. On Tuesday, pus appeared on her finger. By Wednesday, she “started to panic” as her condition worsened.
“I called my doctor, and they said, ‘You need to soak it and massage it while it’s in the hot water, the infection is trapped in there and needs to come out,'” she recalls. “I squeezed it too hard. If you tell me I need to get the infection out, I was trying to get the infection out.”
“I felt weird after I had done that Wednesday night, like my fingertip was purple. It was hot to the touch, and I felt uncomfortable with it,” she continues.
Soon after, Marie went to urgent care and, after talking to the doctor, realized that she needed to go to the emergency room.
Kara Marie
“I got to the hospital, and they took me straight back into the ER. I went from registration to triage to the emergency room,” she recalls. “I have no preparation for being in the hospital. They took me back, and they immediately hung an IV bag of antibiotics and paged the hand surgery department.”
When the hand surgeon took a look at the infection, he told her they would need to cut it open and drain it, with the possibility of even removing the nail, which Marie wanted to avoid at all costs.
“They numbed up my finger, opened it up, cleaned it out, and then they bandaged it,” she shares. “He said, ‘immediately we’re admitting you because we’re gonna keep you on antibiotics overnight.’ ”
When she objected, the doctor explained that infections on your left hand can be dangerous as there’s a direct route to your heart and the infection could spread. They warned her about all the things to look out for if the infection progressed and then left.
The following day, a physician’s assistant came in and discussed her being discharged, but Marie began feeling pain in her finger. She told the PA that she didn’t want to go home, fearing things would get worse and she’d have to return.
They gave her another bag of antibiotics and told her to stay in the hospital another day. They brought back the hand surgeon and he ultimately decided they needed to remove her nail. They then administered antibiotics and instructed her on how to care for her finger over the next few days and weeks.
Despite being discharged, Marie woke up with a fever on Saturday morning, noticing that her finger was still swollen. She went back to the emergency room, and they did a health panel, checking her heart to make sure she wasn’t having a cardiac episode. Thankfully, everything came back clear, and she was able to go home once again.
When she saw her primary care doctor a few days later, things were looking a little better, and she was told to continue soaking her finger three times a day.
Still, doctors told Marie that it would take six months to one year before her nail would fully grow back. Amid the scary situation, her cat Sponge could tell that something was wrong. She says he has been glued to her side ever since.
Marie posted a video about the incident on TikTok, which amassed 5.5 million views. While people in the comments debated how she could have prevented the infection, Marie reiterates that she has a clean home, and this was a freak accident.
“My cat is very well loved and taken care of. We’re very clean people. I’m like a germaphobe, and there’s nothing wrong with my house or my animals; it was a freak accident,” she tells PEOPLE. “Anything could cause this. It happened to be the cat. I love my animals. Cats are safe, even if they come out of their litter box.”
She says the “most important thing” is to listen to your body, and “if you feel something is off, get it checked out.”
“There’s nothing wrong with advocating for yourself and going to a doctor and saying, ‘Hey, there’s something wrong here.’ I would rather play safe than sorry,” she adds.
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