An Otago woman has had the worst bad hair day imaginable - one that could have killed her.
Two days after dyeing her hair with a commonly available product, Sue Rattray-Johnson, of Roxburgh, was rushed to Dunedin Hospital by ambulance.
"The ambulance guys told me that if I hadn't gone to hospital
when I did I could have died," Mrs Rattray-Johnson said.
She said she did an allergy test on a Thursday night and there were no problems, so she washed and dyed her hair the following Saturday.
"I woke up at 7.30am on the Sunday because my face was really hurting. It had swollen so badly the pressure was causing pain, like high blood pressure," she said.
As the day went on her face became more and more puffy, and by the next day it was so swollen she couldn't see.
She went to her local doctor, who immediately arranged for an ambulance to take her to Dunedin Hospital.
However, Mrs Rattray-Johnson's condition deteriorated so quickly the ambulance had to stop in Lawrence to hook up an intravenous steroid drip.
She said that while she was in the ambulance in Lawrence, the pressure of the swelling caused the top of her scalp to split "and all this muck spilled out".
Mrs Rattray-Johnson said she had used the product three or four times previously, without any problems.
"In the past, I've always used the burgundy or rich plum dye, but this time I used black," she said.
"I'm very angry about it, and I was even more so after a lady rang me from New Plymouth to say the same thing had happened to her."
- NZPA
