I had a biology teacher in high school who had a sixth sense in noticing hickeys, and he would call you out in front of the entire class if you had one.

You could have had a scarf on, covered it up with 55,000 layers of coverup, or sat at the back of the class, huddled down as close to your desk as possible.

It didn’t matter. There was no way he was not going to notice your hickey.

While being called out would almost be a sort of cool sign of the amount of ass your swagged-out, underage self was pulling, being called out by him was just embarrassing. He was one of those cool teachers you didn’t want to cross.

First, he would call you up in front of the class and make fun of you in a sort of lighthearted way.

Then, when you were seated back at your desk, he would launch into a whole speech about how there is NOTHING more disgusting and disrespectful than having a partner who wants to “brand” you, and how we all deserved better than that.

You’d sit there feeling like a total doofus.

Whether his lesson was right or not, that teacher did instill in me a sort of natural aversion to hickies. It’s an aversion I could, at most, thank for a clean-looking neck and maybe a less embarrassing morning-after than some.

But now, a new incident just showed me that perhaps my teacher was saving us from more than just the aesthetics of our necks.

He was saving our lives.

Yep, you read that correctly: our lives.

According to the Independent, a hickey given to Julio Macias Gonzalez, a 17-year-old boy in Mexico City, by his 24-year-old girlfriend reportedly led to a fatal stroke.

It seems that her vampire-like sucking on his neck may have potentially created the blood clot that traveled up to his brain, Hoyestado.com reports.

Shortly after being with his girlfriend, Gonzalez started having convulsions during dinner with his family, and unfortunately lost the battle for his life.

His girlfriend is reportedly in hiding. And I can’t say I blame her.

Remarkably, this is not the first hickey-induced stroke case. Another also occurred in 2010, but luckily, the woman survived.

The moral of this story? Not only is being “branded” not cool in my high school teacher’s opinion, it has the possibility of turning into a life-threatening mistake. Yikes.