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“She just lets out this blood-curdling scream.”
A West Virginia teen had to be hospitalized after getting scalded by a squishy toy — akin to the viral mystery dumplings or NeeDoh cubes — that had been mistakenly left in a hot car.
“We weren’t even a mile up the road, and she just lets out this blood-curdling scream,” the child’s distraught parent Kim Staggs, told KDKA, CBS reported. “My heart sank.”
She had reportedly just picked up her daughter Natalee from her grandparents’ house in a car that, unbeknownst to her, had one of the gelatinous knick-knacks lying in the back seat.
These hazardous toys have fallen under intense scrutiny after a TikTok trend led children to microwave them, causing these sweltering jelly bags to explode and shower experimenters with molten goo.
In this instance, Stagg’s car had inadvertently acted like a solar oven, causing the squishy toy to heat, weaken and expand.
When Natalee hopped in the back seat, the gel bubble burst all over her legs, causing her to let out an “awful scream.”
Her distraught parent recalled looking back to see the exploded toy child’s lab coated in a translucent sticky liquid, which was later identified as silicone.
“The stuff inside of it was like this thick,” Staggs recalled. “The only way I could explain it was like a hot taffy after it had cooled.”
The West Virginian shared photos of her daughter, whose thighs are visibly burned and covered in the viscous substance as if rubbed with Vaseline.
Staggs subsequently drove Natalee to the hospital, where medics were fortunately able to treat her burns with cooling agents and saline.
The relieved parent is thanking her lucky stars that her child’s injuries weren’t worse.
“That nurse said, ‘You are not lucky, you’re blessed,’ because if it would’ve been a different type of squishy, it could’ve been really bad,” she recalled. “It could’ve popped in her face, just anything.”
In light of the horrific saga, Staggs is warning other parents about the dangers of leaving these seemingly innocuous trinkets in a hot vehicle.
“If we can put a stop to it, that’s the goal right there,” she said.
Unfortunately, Natalee isn’t the only victim of an exploding squishy toy of late.
In May, a 10-year-old UK girl named Bella’s attempt at microwaving a NeeDoh cube backfired, leaving her with “traumatizing” burns all over her face.
“It looked like she’d been whacked in the face,” her mother, Charlotte, 42, recalled.
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