BY SHARON SALYER
EVERETT, Wash. -- Cindi Reedes heard doctors tell her the same frightening words three times in eight days: Her teenage daughter's chances of survival were slim. It would take a near-miracle to save her from the aggressive infection ravaging her body.
The only cause doctors could guess at was the tongue piercing 18-year-old Lacey Filosa got without her mother knowing about it.
For weeks, Lacey wavered at the edge of death, kept in a drug-induced coma to give her struggling body every chance to heal. A tube kept her breathing. Operations to cut out the infection were needed nearly every day.
At her daughter's bedside, Reedes did everything a mother could to let Lacey know she was there. Doctors told her to talk to Lacey as if she were awake.
"My son and I would rub lotion on her feet," Reedes said. "I'd take her hand and say, 'We're here. Come on! Pull through this!'" Sometimes, in response, her daughter would squeeze her mother's hand.
No one can say with certainty what triggered the infection.
Doctors suspect it was linked to a tongue piercing Filosa had gotten in Everett, a type of piercing popular with young adults. Their theory: Bacteria commonly found in the mouth and saliva possibly entered Lacey's bloodstream through the hole punched through the girl's tongue. Once inside, they flourished, triggering a firestorm of infection.
"I kept looking for other causes, but could not find any," said Dr. James Erhardt, the Everett physician who first treated Lacey at Providence Everett Medical Center. "The only thing we could trace it to was the tongue piercing."
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