In a wild and tough-to-believe incident, a California woman got a rare infection from a manicure that later turned to cancer.
That woman is Grace Garcia. She says she got a routine manicure and pedicure and wound up with an infection that soon became cancerous. She posted about the horrifying incident and its repercussions on TikTok.
"It all started w/Mani/Pedi that went wrong!" she captioned the post. "Nail tech cut me with unsterilized tools! which within 6 months turned in to CANCER!!"
Garcia was invited on Good Morning America to talk about what happened. She says the incident took place back in November 2021. She went in to get a manicure and a pedicure before Thanksgiving. But the visit to the salon turned into something she never expected.
Garcia says she's been getting mani-pedis for decades. But this time it was different. "As the technician was cutting my cuticle, she cut me," she recalled. "It was a deep cut and I remember being very upset about it."
Most people would be upset at being cut during a manicure. But Garcia had no idea what she was in for — that is, until the cut wasn't healing properly.
"It felt as if I couldn't bump my finger into anything," she said. "I couldn't use it. I couldn't type well. It felt tender to the touch."
Garcia says she was in pain from the cut. In April 2022, she was referred to dermatologist Dr. Teo Soleymani for a biopsy. "It came back as a squamous cell carcinoma, which is a very common form of skin cancer," Soleymani told GMA.
"But interestingly … she didn't have any of the traditional signs … hers was HPV-driven. And it's an interesting thing to see."
We commonly think of HPV (human papillomavirus) as being a sexually transmitted infection (STI). It's typically spread from skin-to-skin contact, which is why it's often transferred through sex. But it can occasionally contaminate equipment, like in this case. The virus can lead to certain forms of cancer, such as cervical cancer, but most of the time, people don't even know they have it. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 42 million Americans have some form of an HPV infection.
HPV vaccines are recommended for anyone over the age of 9, as they can help prevent close to 90% of HPV-related illness. Clearly, Garcia's case was something we don't commonly hear about, but Dr. Soleymani says it does happen.
"Grace had a very obvious injury that allowed a portal of entry for the higher risk strain to kind of get in there," Soleymani explained. "The reason we don't see it in places like our hands or our face or anywhere where we have thick skin is generally, our skin has a top layer that's pretty protective."
