Woman Who Scratched Into Brain

In Massachusetts, a woman known only as M., a former health care worker living with HIV complications, developed a relentless itch on the right side of her scalp after a shingles outbreak left the skin numb. No creams or psychiatric drugs helped, and one morning she woke with greenish fluid on her face and learned in the emergency department at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston that she had scratched through her scalp and skull into her brain. Surgeons cleaned and grafted the wound, but the phantom itch drove her to rub away skin grafts until staff on a locked rehabilitation ward resorted to a foam football helmet and taped mitts at night to keep her from injuring herself. The brain injury had left her partially paralyzed and estranged from her children, and she controlled the still-present itch with trimmed nails and soft tools instead of the unchecked scratching that had nearly killed her.

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