A Kentucky woman claims she was a victim of an accidental overdose after she picked up a dollar bill from the ground.
Renee Parsons was traveling with her family to a conference near Dallas. Partway there, they stopped at a McDonald’s in Bellevue, Tennessee. Parsons saw a dollar bill on the ground and grabbed it, then losing consciousness mere moments later. Her husband, Justin, said, “she looked like she was dying” and that she, “certainly was unconscious and very pale.”
“I see a dollar bill on the ground. Thinking absolutely nothing of it—I picked it up,” Mrs. Parsons said. “My body went completely numb, I could barely talk and I could barely breathe.”
“It’s almost like a burning sensation, if you will, that starts here at your shoulders, and then it just goes down because it’s almost like it’s numbing your entire body,” she added.
Parsons was taken to a hospital and treated for an accidental drug overdose. She was released four hours later.
The Parsons are confident that there was fentanyl or another powerful drug on the dollar bill, despite the fact that Mrs. Parsons’ toxicology report came back negative for synthetic drugs. The Metropolitan Nashville Police Department said they did not find traces of synthetic drugs on the dollar bill either but destroyed it out of an abundance of caution.
Dr. Rebecca Donald, an assistant professor of anesthesiology and pain medicine at Vanderbilt University, claimed that it was unlikely that the drug was fentanyl.
“It is much more likely for her to have a reaction if she had inadvertently rubbed her nose and exposed that drug to some of the blood vessels in her nose or licked her fingers or rubbed her eyes,” she said.
Dr. David Edwards, another Vanderbilt doctor, said to local news that just touching most drugs cannot cause an overdose, requiring ingestion.
“You know ingesting something is a different story than touching something. Your skin is a really good barrier and will likely protect you and you won’t just randomly overdose from just any medicine you are touching for a short period of time,” Edwards said.
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