After her young daughter was seriously injured in a freak accident at an amusement park, a California mother wants to warn other parents about the dangers of playground equipment. Amelia Zamora's then 2-year-old daughter was playing at a small amusement park called FairyTale Town in Sacramento when the mother and daughter went down the Big Red Shoe slide and the toddler got hurt.
Zamora didn't realize at first how serious her daughter's injuries were, but soon the family was in an ambulance, and the little girl ended up in a full-body cast. She recently shared a TikTok to help raise awareness of hidden dangers on the playground.
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The family was with other kids for a play date.
In a blog post from 2018, Zamora explained that shortly before the accident, she and her daughter were with friends at FairyTale Town for an afternoon of fun. The children all wanted to slide down the Red Shoe, a slide Zamora said had been there for at least 20 years because her brother played on it as a child. The mother and daughter went down the slide together, and that is when the trouble began.
"This slide was so steep and since metal has zero traction we FLEW off. I tried stopping us at the bottom with my feet, but the momentum of my weight (mind you, I am not a big heavy person either. I'm 5'4 and 165 lbs) with the steepness of the slide had us both flying off," she wrote.
At first, she didn't realize how seriously her daughter was hurt.
The little girl appeared to have an injured kneecap, and Zamora was scraped, but the mom thought her daughter was OK. Later that evening, she and her husband took her to the ER and, through X-rays, found that she had a broken femur.
That bone is reportedly very hard to break, so the injury was severe. The medical team fit the little girl for a splint and planned to put on a cast a few days later.
Putting on the cast was complicated.
When she finally got fitted for her cast, called a spica, Zamora said her daughter had to be put under anesthesia and had a trachea tube put down her throat.
"We were finally able to go home about an hour later but since a spica cast goes from her rib cage down to her ankles with a hole cut out in the genital region, there was no way we were going to be able to place her in her car seat to go home!" she wrote.
They ended up in an ambulance.
The cast was a nightmare.
Zamora recalled how difficult it was caring for a toddler in a cast. It covered nearly her entire body, with only an opening in the genital area. The mom struggled to transport her daughter to appointments, but she made it work.
"She was in the cast for 4 weeks. I had to be innovative and my mother and mother-in-law helped with some ideas on how to try and live our normal routine," she wrote.
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Today, she hopes to prevent other accidents.
When Zamora shared her TikTok, it got 1.8 million views. She captioned the video in part, "So here's my PSA to those parents who think it won't happen to them: don't risk it. hold their hand off the side or just give them encouragement to go alone and if the slide looks too steep, be prepared to catch them at the bottom because looking back, I wish I would've just told her not that slide.❤️"
Parents thanked her for the warning.
"Thank you for sharing your story, so many of us have done exactly this and just been lucky. My grands are now at the age so I'll be very careful!" one person wrote.
Another person agreed, commenting, "Hadn't never thought about that scenario and had never heard of those possibilities happening. Which is kinda crazy because I am so overly cautious."
Others told her not to feel guilty.
"just [remember] it happened because you're a fun mom who spends time with her kids. accidents happen mama!!" another comment reads.
