The mother, named Eden Strong from US sharing a post warned parents the danger of bath toy on Facebook and the post went viral, garnered 60k responses and 328k shares.
In the Facebook post, she wrote that she hesitated before to share her story, for fear the images might be too gross. But after much thought, she decided to share her experience to serve as a warning to others.
The mother of the 2-year-old boy, Baylor said she knew water could get trapped in bath toys, particularly the rubber ones designed to squirt water. She have seen the posts where mom’s have cut them open and discovered a ridiculous amount of mold inside. Thus, she squeezed them out after each bath, cleaned them out every few weeks with a bleach water solution, and regularly held them up to the light to look for mold.
However, she didn’t know that even with regular bleach cleaning, the fact that they never fully dry on the inside means that bacteria can still grow.
Her nanny told her, “Baylor squirted himself in the eye with a tub toy,” then she noticed Baylor’s eye was a little bit red. She thought it was just irritated from the water, or maybe the pressure of the water, and so she didn’t think much of it.
During the dinner time, she noticed that his eye looked even redder than it had earlier, so Eden and her husband run him to hospital, assuming he had pink eye (conjunctivitis).
The doctor agreed and got his first dose of eye drops . Then she decided to give him a booster dose in the middle of the night just to assure he would be feeling better by morning.
She wasn’t expecting to find him in his bed with an eye twice the size as it was when he went to bed, with redness spreading down his cheek. They rushed to hospital again and doctors diagnosed he was developing cellulitis, wrote him a prescription for oral antibiotics, which they filled and gave him at 2:30am.
When Baylor woke up at 6am and Eden laid eyes on him in his bed, she screamed to her husband to get in the car. His eye was so swollen that the white part was bulging out from between his eyelid and his iris was being obscured. He felt hot to the touch and a temperature check showed that he had a raging fever. They driving him to the hospital again, praying that he wouldn’t lose his eye.
Baylor was given an IV antibiotics as soon as we walked through the hospital doors and because of the significant swelling, a CT scan was done to check his retina.
He had severe cellulitis that eventually spread down his face and to both eyes. The doctors warned them that Baylor may lose vision in the worse eye, but luckily his eyes healed.
“So bath toys? THROW THEM OUT. You cannot clean them, you just can’t,” The mother urged everyone to share the post and prevent another baby from going through what they went through.
Pictures via FB