A seemingly innocent “love bite” on the neck turned into a kiss of death for a Mexico teen–a cautionary tale, to be sure.
Julio Macias Gonzalez, 17, died after suction from the killer kiss from his unnamed 24-year-old girlfriend gave him a blood clot, which moved to his brain and caused a stroke.
Hickeys—for generations the tale-tell sign of teenage hanky-panky—are generally considered embarrassing, tacky, or silly. But this is the first documented case of a hickey fatality.
Can a hickey actually kill you?
It would have to be “the mother of all hickeys,” Robert Glatter, an emergency room physician at New York’s Lenox Hill Hospital told the USA Today. “It’s possible this could happen, but it’s very rare, and parents should be reassured it’s not something that happens in a routine way.”
This is not the first time that a nefarious neck nibble did severe damage. In 2010, a 44-year-old New Zealand woman wound up in the emergency room complaining that she was unable to move her arm. The ER doctors’ diagnosis was that she suffered a minor stroke, which they claimed was caused by a hickey on her neck. Luckily for her, she recovered.
The New Zealand Medical Journal studied this unusual issue shortly after and concluded:
It is a rare phenomenon and diagnosis requires a high index of suspicion.
Suspicion indeed!
Here’s a little helpful advice:
The next time your lover whispers in your ear something like “I want to suck on your neck so hard I am going to leave an ugly purple mark and possibly break your blood vessels causing a clot and potentially killing you,” gently resist.
Posted By: Al Olson
