A six-year-old girl got into a freak accident and was almost blinded when she tried to reach for a piece of clothing while shopping with her grandmother on 8th January.
According to Daily Mail, Cecilia Chen was at the Chatswood Chase shopping centre in Sydney with her grandmother looking for a pink t-shirt that she wanted.
While the grandmother was looking through the shirts on a high rack, Cecilia spotted a pink one and tried to reach it but she was not tall enough. So, she jumped in an attempt to reach it.
However, she lost her balance and ended up smashing her right eye into a metal clothes hook on the lower rack. Her top eyelid, including her eyelashes, was sliced off and she was left screaming in extreme pain.
Cecilia was rushed to Randwick Children’s Hospital where she had to wait seven hours before she entered the operating room. The surgeons took four hours to restore her eyelid, but her mother says she will never look the same again.
“Everything happened so suddenly. Grandma could do nothing to prevent it,” the girl’s mother said, adding that Cecilia had to undergo plastic surgery to repair her eyelid muscle and lacrimal gland.
“Luckily her eyeball was not damaged, but it will take a long time for Cecilia’s sight to return to normal,” she said.
“Her right eye lid will be lower and smaller and never look the same. She is very sad and scared.”
Cecilia’s mother is now campaigning for the shopping centre to make clothes racks safer for children as this is not the first time this kind of accident has happened.
Poor Cecilia. Thankfully she wasn’t blinded by the incident. We pray for her speedy recovery.
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