A girl ended up in a coma after attempting a TikTok challenge she had seen on the social media app. In recent years all types of “challenges” have gone viral on the popular app. Sometimes they are harmless and fun, but many have ended in tragedy for young participants.
Despite TikTok challenges putting kids’ lives in danger, they persist. But now, the girl’s parents are trying to warn other parents about what could come from them.
Seven-year-old Scarlett Selby from Festus, Missouri, was attempting the viral NeeDoh challenge she saw on TikTok and YouTube. NeeDoh is a squishy stress cube that is made of rubber with polyvinyl alcohol filling. In the challenge, people are putting the cube in the freezer before putting it in the microwave for a few seconds to make it easier to squish.
“She’d frozen the NeeDoh cube the night before, and the next day she showed me it was rock solid and was playing with it,” her father, Thomas Selby, told news agency Kennedy News & Media, reported the New York Post. “She stuck it in the microwave. I was watching her and saw her touch it to check it wasn’t too hot when she pulled it out.”
Suddenly, the cube exploded, covering Scarlett in molten hot goo. “It all happened so quickly,” the father said. “I heard her scream, and it was like a blood-curdling scream.”
Thomas was quickly at his daughter’s side, attempting to scrape the goop off his daughter. But according to the bereft father, the mixture was too “thick and sticky” to successfully get it off the girl.
“Whenever I touched her, my hand stuck to her,” he shared, adding that he “ripped her shirt off of her” as the gel had adhered itself to her shirt as well.
He and his wife loaded their daughter into the car, rushing the girl to St. Louis Children’s Hospital, 30 minutes away. According to her parents, Scarlett was “still screaming in pain” when they got there. Her mother, Amanda Blankenship, said it was “terrible how scared” the girl was, and “how much that hurt her.”
Once at the hospital, doctors put Scarlett in an induced coma. They were afraid that the burns around her mouth could cause her airways to swell up. She was in the coma for three days, and she used a feeding tube for her weeklong stay in the hospital.
Doctors decided against performing a skin graft on Scarlett for now. Her mother explained that they’re going to give the girl “a couple of years” before doing any grafts, “maybe until she’s around 12.” They want to wait to see how her body grows, and how the scarred skin changes.
“We’re still putting creams and silicone ointments on it daily — they’re such profound scars that stick up off of her skin,” the mother said.
But the scars aren’t only physical. “She gets very self-conscious, and I’ll see her trying to cover her scar up with her shirt when we’re out in public sometimes, or she’ll come home from school and say another kid asked her about it,” her mother said. “I tell her she doesn’t need to be embarrassed about it. She went through a lot and it was a terrible, terrible accident.”
Now, her father is warning other parents about NeeDoh. “I’ve told absolutely everyone to throw them out if they have them,” he said. “The product that’s in it is like glue, so you essentially have hot glue exploding on you. Once it touches you, there’s no way to get it off.”
While NeeDoh maker Schylling Toys hasn’t made a statement about Scarlett’s accident, its website states: “Do NOT heat, freeze or microwave, may cause personal injury.”
