Woman Accidentally Gets Pack of Toilet Paper in Washing Machine (Exclusive)

One woman had a particularly difficult day.

On TikTok recently, Colleen Lorig shared the story of her bad day, which reached its peak when she opened her washing machine and realized she had accidentally washed her load of towels with a pack of toilet paper. In the video, she shows the carnage in her washing machine, with wet toilet paper lining the sides of her tub.

“I was just having a bad day, like a bunch of little inconvenient things were happening,” Lorig, 31, tells PEOPLE exclusively. “There’s so much going on in the world like it’s not a bad day, but really inconvenient. So I opened [the washing machine,] and I started crying.”

Prior to posting the video of her talking herself out of “crashing out” over the washing machine incident, she shared another video of herself opening a fresh bag of Quest protein chips to find mere crumbs.

“I call my mom and I’m crying and she’s laughing. And the reason I was crashing out so hard is I’m a single mom and rent was due,” she shares. “I just paid rent, bought the groceries for me and the kids. And so I was like very upset  because I was like, I actually cannot get more toilet paper right now.”

Though she says those in her support system were more than ready to offer her some toilet paper while she waited for her next paycheck, it was the series of events from that day that really tipped her over the edge.

“I had purchased it probably a couple weeks ago. It was a huge thing of toilet paper. So it sat above my washing machine and the plastic was open. Every time I needed toilet paper, I just grabbed a roll. So it all just kind of tumbled down [into the machine],” she recounts. “But I didn’t notice because I had my AirPods in, I was doing other housework.”

She details how she had a bundle of towels in her arms when she went to load the washing machine. Lorig suffered a stroke six years ago when she was just 25. She had an AVM, which she describes as a “little malformation of veins and blood vessels in your brain that you have when you’re born. You don’t know about it until it explodes.”

As a result, she has some limited movement in her right hand, which she says made it so she had to use her chin to help hold up the load of towels she was carrying. Couple this with her already annoying day and her auto-pilot chore routine, and it was easy for her to miss that the open toilet paper pack had fallen into the washer before she started her load.

Though she’s able to laugh about the mistake now, she admits that the cleaning process is something that will “haunt me for a long time.”

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“I literally had to do it in silence. I was so upset,” Lorig says. “It took a couple hours. But my mom was like, you know what? Open the [washer], and then in the morning, hopefully, it’ll be a little bit dry, and just shake it out.”

“That’s what I did in [my follow-up] video. I’m just shaking all the toilet paper essentially out,” she continues. “And then I had to go through and scoop all the wet toilet paper — which is disgusting texturally, but you know, people have had worst days. It’s fine. I had to do the wash a couple times. Someone suggested that I run like vinegar through my wash, which dissolved the rest of it.”

Unfortunately, she admits that it’ll likely be some time before all of the toilet paper has worked its way out of her washing machine, and she’s readying herself to make the call to her apartment’s maintenance department to see if they can help expedite that process. But for now, Lorig is able to laugh about it. 

Her toilet paper supply has also been re-upped. She was gifted two large packs from Instacart after her video went viral, one of which she says she will probably donate to a local pantry because “I don’t even know what to do with all that toilet paper!”