A woman named Erica Diaz nearly died of blood poisoning when a piece of glitter, that she was using to make her older daughter’s Valentine’s Day card, got stuck in her eye.  The glitter became lodged in her eye, and caused a dangerous infection that left here in the hospital for weeks. Eventually Diaz feared for her life after the glitter sent her into sepsis. 

The glitter got lodged in her eye when the 33-year-old writer and singer was struggling to get the leftover glitter her and her daughter had used into a tall trashcan. Diaz spoke with DailyMail.com to tell her story, “As I dropped the craft scraps in, some of the glitter poofed up into a little glitter cloud and one piece got into my eye,” she said. She tried to rinse the glitter out of her eye, and thought that she had managed to do just that, but the irritation persisted. 

The next day she went to the emergency room, doctors gave her eye drops, but Diaz watched in horror as her eye worsened until it became milky and gray.

Diaz had to spend a month in and out of the hospital, receiving  eye drops, two failed corneal transplants, and injections to save her life. This was not enough, and Diaz found her herself facing possible death as the glitter could rupture and poison her blood.

Eventually, doctors were left with only one option, they had to remove her eye. Diaz remembered that after the failed transplants “the eye [had] started to grow internal tumors and to dimple,” she said. “The surgical team agreed the eye was trying to reject it and it needed to be removed immediately.” Diaz said that at that point, it was the only decision to make, “The surgeons and I decided that since I had no function left in the eye at all, it was constantly painful, and now could realistically lead to sepsis and death that it just needed to go.”

Her eye was removed. Diaz said, “I ended up stripped of all the things that I thought made me beautiful, and I figured out that even as a chubby bald Cyclops I was still a beautiful woman, still a beautiful human. I’m thankful for it all in that way.” But her troubles were not over.

Months later Diaz had a prosthetic eye implanted, but her family was now facing huge medical bills. “I don’t think people understand how expensive it can be, I was on 12 different eye drops at one point and at least one of them was $1,000.” To make matters worse, her husband had to take two months off of work to help her through her recovery. The family has since started a GoFundMe page to help with her medical bills.

Despite the hardships that she and her family has faced, Diaz says she is actually grateful for the experience. “The flip side of that, though, is that it’s also done a lot of good.” She said that is has brought her family, her loving husband and two children, closer together, and has also allowed her to better respect her self, and accept her flaws. She now focuses much more energy on her passions and improving herself, as opposed to whether she is, “too short or too fat,” she said.

She added that she knows what happened to her was a freak accident, and hopes her story won’t make people avoid glitter in the future.

(Photo: Stefka Pavlova/Getty Images)