- While eating a salad with edible flowers, an influencer felt something prick and disappear on her cheek.
- Millions of strangers tuned in to watch Alexa Hendricks seek medical treatment.
- Hendricks told Insider that she’s baffled by all the attention, as she’s still trying to find answers.
Alexa Hendricks was out for lunch with her sister on a trip to New York City last Friday, finishing a salad with edible flowers on top, when she suddenly “felt a sting in her cheek,” the 22-year-old said. The influencer said in a TikTok that she has been viewed 1.3 million times.
Hendricks, a Kentucky-based lifestyle creator who has 211,000 followers on TikTok, initially assumed a sharp flower stem had pierced her cheek. She tried to dislodge it with her tongue and finger, “but it started getting shorter and shorter,” she said, “and it was literally being pushed into my cheek.”
Thus began a widely watched and still ongoing medical saga as Hendricks sought answers from various doctors as to what, if anything, remains “embedded” in his mouth.
Although a doctor told her he didn’t think she had anything on her cheek, she still feels pain. Some of her most devoted followers are arguably more concerned than she is, convincing themselves that something, perhaps a plant particle, is still lodged there. The Hendrick saga is part of a curiously growing trend of body medical mysteries on TikTok —those that viewers are convinced they can solve.
His first visit to the doctor was inconclusive, but he caught the attention of 2.5 million people.
When he returned home from New York on Sunday, the pain in his cheek made it difficult for Hendricks to eat and sleep. His first trip was to the dentist, which he recounted on TikTok, leaving the doctor a little flummoxed: “I don’t know what to suggest,” the dentist can be heard saying in the video.
Hendricks had an appointment the next morning with an oral surgeon. He was also working on a new theory inspired by his mother, a registered nurse: that the object in question was a “little cactus stick.”
“My mom said that she had been pricked by a cactus before and what happened was that the cactus went in and then dissolved into her skin,” Hendricks told Insider. “That was her thought… but I never ate a cactus or anything.”
At the oral surgeon, Hendricks received more unsatisfactory updates. The doctor did not believe he had anything impaled in his cheek, but rather that the stab wound had traumatized the tissue, which can flare up days after the incident, he said. Hendricks received a prescription for mouthwash and ibuprofen, and has a follow-up appointment in a week if things don’t improve.
“Obviously, the doctor said, we don’t want to just cut you open,” he told Insider. But viewers didn’t necessarily agree.
“Still some in there! Guaranteed,” one person wrote, and Hendricks replied that he agreed.
“Wait, aren’t they going to remove it?” another concerned viewer added.
Some, due to another alarming viral incident earlier this min th, they are theorizing that it could be a grill brush. Hendricks said he hadn’t been to a barbecue recently or come in contact with a grill brush, which put to rest those frantic concerns.
Hendricks is still searching for answers as these mysterious medical videos take on a life of their own.
On Tuesday morning, Hendricks said he was feeling better. “He’s definitely not as swollen as he’s been in the last two days,” he said.
But she’s still not sure if the object—whether it’s a flower stalk, a cactus spike, or a nut particle (another floating theory from her dentist)—remains. “I know what I felt,” she said of the initial jab. “But maybe it’s somehow been pushed out or disbanded.”
He is also beginning to have cold symptoms. “I don’t know if that’s like the change in weather from being in Kentucky or allergies, but my mom said, ‘Well, what if it’s an infection?'”
While she’s happy to receive so much support from strangers online who are concerned about her health, the attention has also been overwhelming.
“I wasn’t even going to share it at first, and now I have millions of people investing in this little cheek,” he said. “That wasn’t the plan, but I’m not mad about it.”
Hendricks’ journey is now part of a growing fascination in the app with unresolved medical ailments, specifically lodged foreign objects. Earlier this month, a woman on TikTok also went viral after sharing that she thinks he has a needle stuck in his foot. While the doctor visits were also inconclusive, she and her followers are convinced that she may still be living in her body, possibly climbing up her leg. As mentioned above, a Florida pediatric emergency physician also recently went viral for sharing a disturbing account of a boy who discovered he had a metal barbecue brush stuck in the area of his right tonsil.
