Ricky Kennedy was 57 years old when a small wound on his thumb turned into an emergency that nearly cost him his life. The man, who lives in Scotland and is a grandfather, had been biting his nails for years, but that time he bit one of them too deeply and caused himself an injury.
A blister appeared on his finger shortly afterward. Kennedy went to a doctor, who determined that it was an infection and prescribed antibiotics. However, his condition quickly worsened, and the infection began spreading up his arms and even to his chest.
When he arrived at the hospital, doctors discovered that he had developed sepsis, a potentially fatal reaction by the body to an infection. According to Kennedy’s account, they told him he had approximately a 50% chance of surviving.
The pain became so intense that he could barely move. “I thought I was having a heart attack and genuinely believed I was going to die“, he later recounted. He also acknowledged that he had never imagined that such a small wound could be responsible for what was happening: he had bitten his nails that way hundreds of times before.
Kennedy managed to survive, but the infection had consequences that went far beyond the initial wound. He spent several months in the hospital and was subsequently left with septic arthritis, asthma, and damage to the area around his collarbone. He even had to undergo surgery to repair the damage caused by the infection.
His story began circulating in 2018 as an extreme example of how an apparently small injury can become complicated. That said, the case does not mean that biting your nails normally causes sepsis: what happened to Kennedy was a serious and uncommon complication of an infection.
In his case, it all started with something that seemed insignificant: a nail bitten too deeply and a small wound on a finger.