Hickey causes woman partial paralysis

It turns out that the quickest way to a woman's heart is through her arteries. The result of a passionate "lovebite" turned into a rather terrifying emergency for one New Zeland woman.

A new publication in the New Zealand Medical Journal (NZMA) accounts an unusual case that challenged doctors to discover an underlying cause for a woman's sudden paralysis. A 44-year-old Maori woman entered the emergency department of Middlemore Hospital in Auckland, New Zealand after experiencing sudden paralysis in her left arm while she claimed to have been sitting and watching television. The woman's case was received as a true medical mystery before doctors discovered that watching television hadn't been the only thing the woman had been doing, yet the event is still considered unusual. Now staffed by the neurology department of Christchurch Hospital, Dr. Teddy Wu claimed in a statement to the Christchurch Press claiming to have treated the woman's perplexing symptoms in Middlemore emergency department about one-year ago. Dr. Wu's diagnosis was a stroke, but was not made until a hickey was discovered on the woman's neck. In an unlikely event, the bruising left by the hickey was directly above a major artery. The trauma caused to the vessel dislodged a clot, which traveled all the way to the woman's heart, causing the minor stroke. "We looked around the medical literature and that example of having a love bite causing something like that hasn't been described before," said Dr. Wu, who prescribed an anticoagulant, which nearly dissolved the clot within a week. The situation was much more serious, though. According to Stuff NZ National many, potentially more serious strokes may have occurred had Dr. Wu not treated the woman quickly.