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Babysitter Sarah Bell thought a Nerf gun battle was just part of the job that comes with looking after kiddos. The babysitter from Montana was watching five boys in January when one of them fired a dart from about seven to ten feet away and hit her directly in the eye. What happened over the next four months is something every parent who owns one of these toys needs to hear.
Sarah ended up with quite an injury.
Sarah shared on her TikTok page, her handle is hanginwithsb, a carousel of photos from the incident and weeks after that happened on a day just like any other.
The photo series was captioned a “4 month eye process,” as her first photo shared that when she was babysitting in January, she got shot in the eye with a Nerf bullet by a child and “couldn’t see out of the eye on the way home.”
In the next upclose photo that shows a clear distinction between the injured eye and the one that didn’t take the hit, she shared that she could “only see white,” and it was like a cloud was covering it. Super scary.
She had to make a visit to the ER and was sent to an ophthalmologist for more testing and treatment.
Several months later, her vision is still not the same.
According to Newsweek, Sarah initially had no qualms about playing Nerf guns with the five boys she was looking after that day because she also played with them as a child.
After the incident, when she got into the daylight and was trying to drive home, she found that the bright light made her injury that much worse and panic started to set in. When she finally reached her home, which was about a 30 minute drive away, she found that “blood had formed in the bottom of [her] eye,” she was in lots of pain, and she couldn’t see, per Newsweek.
After a visit to the ER led nowhere due to limited testing equipment, her ophthalmologist found that there was a hole between her iris and cornea. Doctors found that the injury had disrupted the way her pupil dilated, and at the time her vision deteriorated to 20/70, meaning she could only see clearly approximately 20 feet away.
Though, after some eye drops and steroids, her vision has since returned to 20/20, she still finds that she’s sensitive to sunlight and her one pupil is 0.6 mm larger than the other, Newsweek reported.
Some people in the comments think she should sue the parents.
The comments section on TikTok is not taking this injury lightly, especially considering where the parents come into play.They were likely the ones to give or at least the children to have Nerf guns in the first place.
One person shared, “I would have def sued the parents because wtf.” Another person chimed in with hopes that the parents stepped up to help her with the financial side of things. They wrote, “They better take care of all medical bills at the very least.”
Another individual in the comments left a comment that we can all probably relate to at least a little after experiencing a rough day like this. “Contact a litigation lawyer. Sue NERF, the parents, the kid, the alarm clock that woke you up that morning, everything and everyone must pay!!!”
Someone pointed out how Nerf could have used this incident to promote how kids and adults need to wear protective eyewear while playing with Nerf guns. “Nerf has the perfect opportunity to push/promote safety glasses. I believe they have them but maybe including them in some sets would encourage parents to buy them for their kids,” they wrote.
Bell has since tagged Nerf directly in her posts — not with anger, but with a simple message: the warning on the box about protective eyewear isn’t just fine print.
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