A Perth teenager's first night out as an adult went horribly wrong when she was stabbed with a syringe and woke up paralysed in a nightclub bathroom.
The young woman, known only as Shayna, went out with her friends and sister on Friday night (local time) to celebrate her 18th birthday.
While she was having fun on the dance floor at Northbridge's Universal Bar, she says she felt someone grab her and stab something into her right upper arm.
"I felt someone pull me back, and then I felt a sharp stab, like a needle," she told 7 News.
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She didn't get a good look at the alleged culprit, nor does she know what she was injected with. The next thing she knew she woke up in the club bathroom, unable to move, see or talk.
"It's pretty traumatising," Shayna told 7 News. "I could feel everything, but I couldn't move one limb."
Her older sister Miki found her there and immediately recognised something was wrong. She called an ambulance and Shayna spent the night in Royal Perth Hospital.
Breath testing showed she hadn't been drinking, so doctors suspected her paralysis was caused by whatever fluid she'd been forcibly injected with.
A group of bright spots appeared on her arm after the incident.
What makes the story even more horrifying is that Shayna wasn't the only suspected victim of a syringe stabbing in Northbridge over the weekend.
At about the same time Shayna was taken to hospital, a man showed up claiming to have been stabbed in the arm while he was walking near the Western Australia Museum - a five-minute walk from Universal Bar.
The following evening a second teenage girl was treated at the same hospital displaying similar symptoms to Shayna. She said she'd been the victim of a needle incident at nearby bar The Court.
Police have encouraged anyone in Northbridge who suspects they were targeted over the weekend to come forward. The establishments involved in the alleged syringe stabbings have agreed to hand over their CCTV footage to help with the investigation.
Toxicology results will come back in the next few days, revealing what the victims were injected with. However it will be another six months before they know if they contracted anything from needle, which could potentially include hepatitis or HIV.
Shayna says she came forward about her ordeal because she doesn't want the same thing to happen to anyone else.
"If I didn't have anyone with me, I wouldn't have come back home," she told 7 News. "I don't think I would have survived the night."
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