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A mum has taken to Facebook to warn others about the dangers that could be lurking in your bath toys.
Eden Strong’s son Bailor contracted severe cellulitis that eventually spread down his face and to both eyes after accidentally spraying himself in the face with water from a bath toy.
Now the mum wants others to hear and share her story in the hopes of stopping anyone else from going through the same thing.
“I’ve sat on it for a couple months because the pictures are so gross that I wasn’t sure anyone would want to see this, but after having time to mull it over, I’ve come to the conclusion that I wish I had known and other people should know too,” says Eden.
“I knew water could get trapped in tub toys, particularly the rubber ones designed to squirt water. I’ve seen the posts where mom’s have cut them open and discovered a ridiculous amount of mould inside. I knew.
“So I 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 mould.”
What she didn’t realise was that “invisible bacteria” can still grow on the inside of bath toys because they never fully dry.
Eden explains that her son squirted himself in the eye with water from inside a bath toy. By dinner time, his eye was really red, so her husband took him to “urgent care” where the doctor thought it was pink eye.
“He got his first dose of eye drops and because I was already priding myself on being attentive, I decided to give him a booster dose in the middle of the night just to assure he would be feeling better by morning,” says Eden.
“I wasn’t expecting to find him in his crib with an eye twice the size as it was when he went to bed, with redness spreading down his cheek.”
Thinking it was cellulitis, Eden took her son to the ER at 2:30am, where he was given a prescription for antibiotics.
But the nightmare didn’t end there!
“When he woke up at 6am and I laid eyes on him in his crib, I screamed to my 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,” says Eden.
“I cried the entire drive to a larger hospital, praying that he wouldn’t lose his eye.”
Doctors started Bailor on IV antibiotics. He also had a scan to check his retina as the swelling had been so intense.
“The next week was pretty scary,” says Eden. “He had severe cellulitis that eventually spread down his face and to both eyes. They warned me that he may lose vision in the worse eye, but in the end, thank the Lord his eyes healed.”
Now the mum is warning others.
“But tub toys? THROW THEM OUT. You cannot clean them, you just can’t. I don’t have any mouldy tub toy pictures to show here, because there was never any visible mould to take a picture of.
“You can’t see bacteria and I’ve known that since 6th grade science class but I thought I was better than dirty tub toys. I was wrong.”
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