Lukia Pardoe chugged the bottle at 3 a.m after a night out, saying that she "obviously had quite a lot to drink"
Credit: Kennedy News and Media
NEED TO KNOW
- College student Lukia Pardoe accidentally drank fabric freshener after mistaking it for water following a night out
- She drank multiple glasses of water afterward, which helped flush the chemicals from her system before going to the hospital
- Pardoe said she won’t keep similar items on her desk again
A college student was rushed to the hospital after mistaking a bottle of fabric freshener for water, chugging it after a night out, after she had "had a lot to drink."
Lukia Pardoe, 20, was celebrating the end of the college year at a party on May 8, telling Kennedy News and Media, "I obviously had quite a lot to drink."
She said she hadn't been back to her dorm room in a while, but recalled, "There were three bottles on my desk, two of them were water and one was fabric freshener. I woke up at 3 AM and I was so thirsty because I had been drinking."
Credit: Kennedy News and Media
"I unscrewed what I thought was a water bottle," she said, sharing that at first, she dismissed the burning sensation as having been caused by hot pizza she'd had before bedtime. "I had half of the bottle. I was still really drunk and I carried on drinking it. I just remember thinking, 'This water tastes really bad.' "
Pardoe, who hails from the English city of Birmingham, says that, as the night went on, she kept going to the kitchen to get more water. "I must have gone downstairs to get about 10 more glasses of water. I must have been doing it to get the chemical taste out of my mouth," she explains.
"When I woke up, I realized what I had done," she said. "My friend came into my room and I looked at the bottle and stopped breathing for a second."
"I said 'I've drunk half of that bottle,' " Pardoe said, and shared that a friend drove her to the hospital, bringing the bottle with her. When she showed it to a hospital staffer, "She couldn't breathe [from] laughing. She had to leave the room. She was laughing for 10 minutes."
The good news: Because Pardoe drank so much water afterwards, "I got a lot out of my system." Still, "They gave me charcoal tablets to absorb all the toxins," she said. "I just have a chemical taste and a lot of coughing. At the time I had quite bad stomach cramps."
Credit: Kennedy News and Media
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Although she said she's "never freaked out like that before," she added that she now finds humor in the incident. "My family and friends keep laughing at me, I haven't heard the end of it," she continued. "It is a funny story. I'm very grateful nothing worse happened."
She also learned a valuable lesson: "I'm not going to keep anything like that on my desk again," she said.
PEOPLE has reached out to Pardoe for comment.
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