Woman hospitalized after picking up drug-tainted dollar on ground

A Kentucky woman had to be hospitalized after picking up a dollar she later theorized was laced with drugs in a harrowing ordeal she detailed in a Monday Facebook post.

“My body went completely numb, I could barely talk and I could barely breathe,” Renee Parsons wrote of the alleged accidental overdose, although experts have since disputed her diagnosis.

The scary incident occurred while she was traveling to a conference in Dallas, Texas with her husband Justin and two kids. The family had stopped at a McDonald’s in Bellevue, Tennessee, where Renee spotted some stray cash on the ground and decided to collect it, WKRN News 2 reported.

“I see a dollar bill on the ground. Thinking absolutely nothing of it — I picked it up,” Renee wrote on Facebook.

Within minutes, her body went numb and she could barely move or breathe, News 2 reported.

“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,” explained Renee, who subsequently lost consciousness.

Her aghast husband painted the horrific scene: “She hadn’t said anything for a while, then she said, ‘Justin, I am sorry. I love you.’ Then she just quit talking.”

Justin told News 2, “She looked like she was dying. She certainly was unconscious and very pale.”

Renee wasn’t the only one to experience troubling symptoms. Before she passed out, she had reportedly grabbed her hubby’s arm with the same hand she clutched the money in, whereupon his lips went numb and his arm sprouted a rash.

Fearing the worst, Justin drove his ailing wife at 95 miles an hour to St. Thomas Ascension Hospital, reported News Channel 5. Fortunately, Renee’s symptoms finally abated after four hours, whereupon the facility discharged her on an accidental drug overdose, WSMV 4 reported.

Justin, who reportedly worked in law enforcement for many years, said he believes that the dollar Parsons picked up was laced with fentanyl, which caused her to suffer an adverse reaction.

However, experts have since expressed reservations over the Parson family’s OD theory.

According to a Metro Nashville police officer who was called to the ER, Parsons couldn’t have been exposed to fentanyl as she didn’t require Narcan to be revived while preliminary tests didn’t reveal any drugs in her system. A department spokesperson added that they didn’t find any drug residue on the bill and plan to dispose of it.

Meanwhile, Dr. Rebecca Donald, a fentanyl expert at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, told News 4 that Renee’s symptoms were inconsistent with fentanyl poisoning. Even if the tender was tainted with said narcotic, it would require more than skin-to-skin contact to cause an overdose, per the doctor.

“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,” said Donald.

Nonetheless, Renee is sticking to her theory. “What I do know is how I felt, what happened. It can’t be made up,” the distraught mom told WSMV 4. She said she wants to use her ordeal as a cautionary tale as “it could have been a child” who’d picked up the dollar bill, per News 2.

“The morale, I don’t care if it’s a $20 bill or a $100 bill do not touch it!!!” she warned on Facebook.

Last month, the Perry County Sheriff’s Office issued a warning, which has since gained national attention, after fentanyl-laced money was discovered at two different gas stations.

There are approximately 250 deaths each day due to the fentanyl crisis in America, according to what the organization Families Against Fentanyl has discerned by reviewing the facts from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) about the crisis.

The narcotic is currently the number-one killer of Americans between the ages of 18 and 45.