Keep Your Child Safe From Household Toxins

Janet was a middle-class stay-at-home mom with 3 beautiful children. Life was going great until that dreadful day. Her son Joshua was rushed to the emergency room and then, flown by Life-Flight to Children's Hospital in Pittsburgh. The reason? He swallowed Resolve Carpet Cleaner.

She was cleaning a spot of Kool-Aid from the carpet and had the bottle sitting right next to her. Joshua, who had just turned two in July, was playing on the floor behind her. In the brief moment she had her back turned to scrub the carpet, he picked up the Resolve and squirted it in his mouth. By the time she turned around again, he had already begun to convulse. That is a day no one will ever forget.

They sent little Joshua home on a Friday at 2 AM, less than 18 hours after he drank the Resolve. The cleaner burned and corroded everything it came in contact with on its way through his digestive tract. All could do was sedate him, and put him on life support. Janet said he opened his eyes one time, and in those eyes, she said she could hear him saying, "Mommy, let me go. Let me die, I hurt, I'm in pain." (This story was created using factual events but the sequence of events and names have been changed).

I could never imagine losing a child. But I do know that there is no reason why a child's life should have been taken in this way. Joshua died because of thoughtless manufacturers who don't have enough responsibility to make safe products. Janet was sitting two feet from her son and set the bottle of cleaner down for a second. All of us, when we are cleaning our windows, bathtubs or appliances, set the cleaner down next to us, while we clean up the mess. We don't put it away in between wiping something down.