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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."---
Reedes' phone rang about 7 o'clock on a Thursday evening, March 30, 2006. It was someone from Providence Everett Medical Center. "You need to get here as soon as you can," they told her.Her daughter was at the emergency room. Doctors had already put a tube down her throat so she could breathe.Reedes drove to Everett from her Camano Island home in 20 minutes. She was escorted to a treatment room, where she was shocked by what she saw. Her daughter's neck had swollen to "the size of a man's thigh."All she could think was: "Oh my God, what happened?"The pieces began to fall into place when she talked to another family member who also was at the hospital that night.Lacey already had ear and belly button piercings. She'd been working on her mother to let her get one more a tongue ring.Reedes was dead-set against it.
"I had heard horror stories," she said.That night at the hospital, Lacey's mom learned that about two weeks earlier, her daughter had gone to a local shop and gotten her tongue pierced.
Lacey, who had graduated from Stanwood High School in 2005, had been living temporarily with a girlfriend, so her mom didn't know....
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