A mom has taken to Facebook to share a crucial warning with parents after some dirty bath toys nearly cost her son his eyesight.
Wanting to educate fellow parents, Eden Strong explained that she was fully aware that water could get trapped in tub toys - particularly the rubber ones, which are designed to squirt water.
She had actually seen posts from other moms where they cut the toys open to discover an alarming amount of mold inside.
As a result of this discovery, Eden would squeeze the toys of their excess water after each bath and cleaned them out every few weeks with a solution of bleach and water.
Eden wasn't aware, however, that even with regular bleach cleaning, bacteria can still grow because they are never fully dry on the inside.
And so when her toddler Baylor squirted himself in the eye with a bath toy, she was alarmed when it began to turn worryingly red.
She explained:
"I had my husband run him over to urgent care, assuming he had pink eye. The doctor agreed and I patted myself on the back a bit for being so attentive. 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. 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."
When Baylor's condition seemed to worsen, Eden wondered whether he might be developing cellulitis, and so she took him to ER.
"There, another doctor once again agreed with my diagnosis and wrote him a prescription for oral antibiotics, which we filled and gave him at 2:30 am," she wrote.
"When he woke up at 6 am and I laid eyes on him in his crib, I screamed to my husband to get in the car," she added. "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. Despite having another child with epilepsy and therefore being pretty good at keeping my cool, I cried the entire drive to a larger hospital, praying that he wouldn’t lose his eye."
Eden then shared that her toddler was put on IV antibiotics as soon as they walked through the hospital doors. Due to significant swelling, a CT scan was taken to check his retina.
"The next week was pretty scary," she wrote. "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."
Eden ends the post on a stark warning, writing: "But tub toys? THROW THEM OUT. You cannot clean them, you just can’t. I don’t have any moldy tub toy pictures to show here, because there was never any visible mold 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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