Charlotte Murphy explained in a Facebook post that days after she'd lost her footing and stumbled into a wild parsnip plant, the small red bumps that had appeared on one of her legs turned into painful, yellow, pus-filled blisters.
Warning: Some viewers may find these photos disturbing.
"A week later redness increased and the itch began," Murphy wrote. "Unfortunately I scratched it a lot in my sleep and woke up with blisters on my leg. Throughout the day they grew exponentially to a point where my leg was swollen and I couldn't walk."
She was later rushed to the local urgent care clinic and has since been making daily visits for inspections and new bandages, as her blisters ended up spreading to her arms, fingers and right leg. She is expected to make a full recovery.
Although Murphy knew of the plant and its potential dangers, she hadn't realized that its oils had rubbed onto her leg. As such, she continued to walk about in the sunlight, which only helped to activate the plant's oil.
According to biologists at Pennsylvania State University, wild parsnip, also known as hobo parsnip and poison parsnip, can grow to more than 60 inches tall, sprouting several small yellow flowers that measure roughly 2 inches across. Similar to hogweed, sap from wild parsnip contains chemicals that can cause severe burns once activated by sunlight.
"The sap is toxic and basically strips the body's ability to control the UV radiations from sunlight," Joellen Lampman, an educator with the New York State Integrated Pest Management program at Cornell University, told Live Science.
Murphy isn't the only person who has fallen prey to members of the parsley family. As Sputnik previously reported, a Virginia teenager wound up hospitalized after he received second and third-degree burns from touching a giant hogweed plant.