Mom Warns Parents About Bath Toys After Her Baby Nearly Lost His Sight

Nov 10, 2023

Bath toys are common with parents who want to keep their children engaged while giving them baths, but a woman learned a scary lesson from using them in 2020. The mom, Eden Strong, shared her experience on Facebook on Sept. 21, 2020, after debating for a long time about whether or not to do so. She later decided to share to warn others so they wouldn’t face the same situation. 

“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 mold 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 mold,” Strong started. 

What she didn’t know was that bacteria could still grow as long as the toys didn’t dry thoroughly. 

“Baylor squirted himself in the eye with a tub toy,” Strong’s nanny told her one day on her way from the bathroom with Strong’s son, Baylor. Strong noticed that one of her son’s eyes was a “little bit red” but assumed it was from the water that squirted into his eye. However, the eye had gotten worse by dinner time, so she had her husband take him to the hospital. 

The doctor agreed with Strong’s assumption that Baylor had pink eyes and gave him eye drops. Strong decided to apply some more around midnight, only to find out her son’s eye had swelled to double its initial size. His cheek was also getting red. 

“A bit of an internet medical guru, I immediately wondered if he might be developing cellulitis, and so off to the ER we went. 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 continued. 

Thinking the redness would have subsided by the morning, Strong was shocked to see Baylor’s face at 6 am. 

“His eye was so swollen that the white part was bulging out from between his eyelid and his iris was being obscured,” Strong shared. “He felt hot to the touch and a temperature check showed that he had a raging fever.” 

She called for her husband, and they both rushed Baylor to a bigger hospital, and she cried during the entire drive. Baylor was given IV antibiotics immediately, and a CT scan was carried out to check his retina since his face was really swollen.

“The next week was pretty scary. 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,” Strong disclosed. 

She asked parents to throw out tub toys as they can’t be cleaned to eliminate bacteria. 

“I don’t have any moldy tub toy pictures to show here, because there was never any visible mold to take a picture of,” the mom said. “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. So those tub toys? Just throw them out.”

Since sharing her story, Strong’s post has seen over 300,000 shares.

Have you ever had an experience similar to Strong’s? How did you navigate it? Let us know, and be sure to pass them on to friends and family.