A woman in Houston, Texas, was allegedly poisoned after making contact with a napkin wedged in her car door. She was rushed to the hospital in the aftermath, with doctors speculating that it was a failed kidnapping attempt.
Erin Mims was celebrating her birthday with her husband at a Prospect Park restaurant in Houston on Tuesday afternoon. After the couple left the restaurant, Mims noticed a napkin wedged in the passenger door handle of her car, Fox 26 reports.
According to The Daily Mail, Mims described herself in a Facebook video as a ‘germaphobe’ who would not have touched the napkin. She tossed the napkin away with her nails and didn’t give the action much thought.
Mims initially assumed the napkin was a joke hatched by her husband. She confirmed whether this was the case afterward. “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 sanitizer,” Mims recalled.
“I went inside, washed my hands, and maybe like two minutes later my fingers started tingling,” she said. “After five minutes, my whole arm started tingling, then it started to feel numb, I got lightheaded, I felt like I couldn’t breathe, [and] it got hot. It was just a whole bunch of different feelings at one time. I started to panic.”
On her account, these tingling sensations that spread from her fingers to the entire arm changed to more severe symptoms. “I started getting hot flashes, my chest was hurting, my heart was beating really fast,” said Mims.
She was transported to Houston Healthcare hospital after her husband dialed 911. Doctors ran urine samples, blood tests, and a CAT scan, determining that her vitals were “not stable.” Some doctors said it might have been part of a kidnapping scheme.
“I was there for six and a half hours,” Mims remarked. “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.”
The Houston Police Department said this incident marks the first of its kind seen by the department. Mark Winter, managing director of the Southeast Houston Poison Center, said Mim displayed symptoms similar to “hundreds of different poisons.”
“The probability is that you would have to have a lot more than just a casual exposure,” Winter told the New York Post. “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.”
