“We had been playing with it for a while and all of a sudden the plastic on the fidget spinner exploded,” John wrote to Facebook.
That’s when John says the spinner—which was in his hand—pelted his son’s face between his nose and mouth.
Facebook
They rushed to the emergency room for stitches, and two weeks later, the boy’s face is healing nicely, but John wants other parents to know the dangers of misusing the fad toy.
“I am sharing so no one else has the same stupid idea that I had. We were lucky it missed his eyes. It could have been much worse.”
His warning post has since garnered nearly 300,000 shares from concerned parents.
The scariest part is that John is not alone.
25-year-old Alexander Dögl recently made the same decision to experiment with an air compressor and fidget spinner—hoping to make it “go faster.”
Along with some friends, Alexander did the same thing John and his son were doing, before the toy exploded, landing him in the ER.
“I held it in my hand and sprayed air on it. It started to go faster until fumes started to come out of it. Then it exploded,” he told local news.
YouTube
His thumb immediately began gushing blood, and his friends rushed him to the hospital where he got six stitches. But that wasn’t all.
“I was sent for X-rays, and they saw that I had a fracture in my thumb and the tendon had also been damaged.”
In both cases, the situation could have been much different. Like John said, had the spinner hit his son’s eye, there’s no telling what a few minutes of entertainment would have meant for that little boy’s future.
This isn’t to say that all fidget spinners are bad. But may these scary experiences serve as a warning to all parents and users of fidget spinners, no matter what the age, to use the toy responsibly. It’s not worth the risk.