The case of Marnie-Rae Harvey is a strange one. The UK teen bleeds from her eyes, her ears, her tongue, scalp, nose, gums, her bottom lip and even her fingernails. The doctors are stumped and have no idea why this happens.
Marnie-Rae said “It all started when I was getting headaches and coughing up blood in 2013,”. In an interview with Cosmopolitan UK, she claims she “went to sleep in the afternoon with a really bad migraine and when I woke up I looked in the mirror and one side of my face was covered in blood.”
Marnie quickly realised that the blood was coming out of her eye. “It was frightening to see, I didn’t know what was happening,” she said. Which makes sense, given that she probably looked like something she’d only ever previously seen in a horror film.
But from then on, the bleeding kept happening. It would pour from her eyes every day for the next week, until both ears began to bleed, too.
“All the doctors I have been to have never seen it before,” she said.
The doctors have tried everything from testing her for Thrombocytopenia (a condition where patients have a deficiency of platelets in the blood, causing bleeding, bruising, and slow blood clotting after injury) to Haemolacria (a symptom of many diseases including tumours, which causes a person to produce tears that are partially composed of blood) Nothing has been revealed.
“I’m clear of blood disorders, blood cancers, brain tumours, and AVMs (arteriovenous malformations),” she told us, before adding: “My womb, uterus, ovaries, chest scans were all clear, too.”
Marnie now bleeds up to five times a day, as well as suffering from painful migraines and nausea. “Nothing triggers it,” she said. “It just can happen at any time, and nothing can help to control it.” Which is obviously very frustrating.
But aside from being extremely worrying from a health perspective, Marnie-Rae’s bleeding is seriously impacting her life.
“I cant go to college or get a job or anything, because I feel constantly weak I can only walk so far without being sick,” she said.
“I’m just sick of it,” the 17-year-old told us. “I wish someone just knew what it was so I could get my life back to normal.”
The doctors will keep trying in hopes of finally finding a cure or even discovering what is wrong with her in the first place.