A woman has revealed how she thought she was going to die when she collapsed after picking up a $1 bill from the ground.
On Sunday (July 10), Renee Parsons from Kentucky said she quickly became ill after she picked up the note outside a McDonald’s on Highway 70 in Bellevue, Tennessee.
Writing on Facebook, she said: "We stopped at McDonald’s and while I stand with my 3 month old baby, and wait for my husband so I could go to the bathroom, I see a dollar bill on the ground.
"Thinking absolutely nothing of it - I picked it up. Holding it in my hand I look around and contemplate giving it to the little girl I saw.
"Right then my husband comes out of the bathroom and I throw the dollar in my pocket, hand him the baby, run to the bathroom."
Watch Renee's interview below:But Shortly after picking it up, Parsons said she began to experience numbness all over her body while she was driving with her husband, Justin, and children through Nashville.
"I felt I was dying," she told WKRN. "I couldn’t even breathe. It’s almost a burning sensation if you will, that starts at your shoulders and just goes down (the body)".
After feeling like she was going to lose consciousness, Parsons said she clung to her husband Justin "with the same hand that I had the money in" and said: "'Justin, please help me, it won’t stop, it’s getting worse'."
Her husband also began experiencing the same symptoms and said to the news station: "My lips started going numb and I had my arm broke out in a rash".
Prior to the scary incident, Parsons wrote on Facebook that when she found the random dollar, she told her husband about it. She then remembered him telling her not to pick up money off the ground as people have been putting it in fentanyl.
"Then I grabbed a wipe to wipe off my hands [because] I remembered him telling me not to pick up money off the ground as people have been putting it in fentanyl," she said. "As he began to somewhat lecture me it hit me like a ton of bricks."
The couple was eventually taken to a nearby hospital where Jason was discharged after one hour, and Renee was discharged four hours later.
The doctors recognized the incident as an "accidental" drug overdose, and Parsons said a police officer said the dollar bill had "likely been used to cut or store drugs" such as fentanyl - although this remains unconfirmed.
"The mixture of my wet hands and the alcohol from the wipes, mixed with my bodies reaction to that drug could of cost me my life," she wrote on Facebook. "God has other plans for me and thankfully I’m able to reflect upon and laugh at just how BLESSED I am to have my husband, who drove like my life depended upon it."
However, despite Renee's claims, the New York Post reports that some experts have since voiced their reservations over the family’s OD theory.
An officer from the Metro Nashville police department reportedly says that Parsons decidedly wasn’t exposed to fentanyl as she didn’t require Narcan to be revived. Additionally, the officer - who was called to the ER in response to the incident - states that preliminary tests didn’t reveal any drugs in Renee's system.
Dr. Rebecca Donald, a fentanyl expert at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, also told News 4: "I think it is really unlikely the substance this lady got into her system is fentanyl based on the symptoms she had."
Nevertheless, the mother of six spoke about the dangers of the incident and said a child could have been harmed, including her three-month-old child who was in her arms at the time.
"I just want people to know because it could’ve been a child", Parsons said. She also alerted users on her social media page that the moral of the story is whether it's a "$20 bill or a $100 bill do not touch it!!!"
