A US mum has spoken out about the dangers of bath toys after her son nearly lost an eye. Photo / Supplied
A US mum has spoken out about the dangers of bath toys after her son nearly lost an eye. Photo / Supplied
A mum in the United States has revealed how a bath toy nearly cost her son his eye after he became severely sick and was hospitalised.
Eden Strong shared how her son Baylor had squirted himself in the eye with water from a dirty bath toy despite her best efforts to keep them clean, in a post shared to Facebook.
Strong wrote that she had always known that rubber bath toys can get water trapped inside and lead to a "ridiculous amount of mould".
"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," she said.
"However, I 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. Invisible bacteria."
One night Strong said her nanny told her Baylor had "squirted himself in the eye" with one of his bath toys, noticing his eye was a "little bit red" at first.
"I figured it was just irritated from the water, or maybe the pressure of the water, and so I didn't think much of it," she wrote.
"But when I put him in his high chair that night for dinner and noticed that his eye looked even redder than it had earlier, I had my husband run him over to urgent care, assuming he had pink eye."
A doctor agreed with the parents and they gave Baylor eye drops, however, in the morning Strong discovered her son in his cot "with an eye twice the size as it was when he went to bed" and "redness spreading down his cheek".
Baby Baylor accidentally squirted himself in the eye with a dirty bath toy. Photo / Supplied
Suspecting Baylor had cellulitis, Strong rushed her son to the emergency room where he was given a prescription for antibiotics and sent home.
Confident her son was getting the treatment he needed, Strong said it had been a shock when Baylor's condition had significantly deteriorated by the next morning.
"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," she wrote.
"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."
Once at hospital Baylor was given IV antibiotics and a CAT scan, which revealed he had a bad case of cellulitis.
"The next week was pretty scary. He had severe cellulitis that eventually spread down his face and to both eyes," Strong wrote.
When Baylor's mum noticed how red his eyes were, she rushed him to urgent care. Photo / Supplied
"They warned me that he may lose vision in the worse eye, but in the end, thank the Lord his eyes healed."
Strong ended her post by pleading with parents to throw out their bath tub toys as even if you couldn't see mould there was likely other nasties on them.
"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," she wrote.
Strong's post has since been shared more than 174,000 times and gotten 42,000 comments from other parents, who praised her for sharing her "scary nightmare" experience.
"You can use either solid toys or you can glue the holes shut. But yes definitely don't use anything that sucks up water," one mum commented.
"Honestly, I was too cheap for bath toys," another person wrote. "My kids played with dollar store strainers, cups, bowls and whatever other things I could repurpose that looked fun. Glad I did that now."
