As a ‘90s child, I was obsessed with my Easy Bake Oven. Yes, it gave me third-degree burns sometimes, but it was the ‘90s. I just had to rub some dirt in it. Thankfully, the worst of my problems did not relate to alleged carbon monoxide poisoning like this poor family in Massachusetts.
Mom Stephanie on TikTok posted a video to her account sharing how the family of three ended up in the ER and hospitalized over a weekend thanks to what she said was the Easy Bake Oven.
Stephanie shared in the video that she was in another room of the home when her husband Ryan and her 8-year-old daughter Nora removed the brand new Easy Bake Oven from the box and began to make a two-layered red velvet cake. She said her daughter immediately said the oven smelled weird when they plugged it in, but her husband figured it was because it was a toy and plastic. She also noted that her husband hasn’t had a sense of taste or smell for three years because he had COVID.
@steph_murphy My husband, 8 year old daughter and myself all got admitted to the ER on saturday because of an Easy Bake Oven. Difficulty breathing, shortness of breath, chills, and nauseau. Nothing on Google showed anything similar, so was this a one off or have there been others? It was scary that we all got affected so quickly.
“The smell went away,” she said. And they continued to cook. Stephanie added while the cake was baking, they went into the living room to play the switch for 16-20 minutes. When they took the cake out of the oven, they found it wasn’t cooked fully, so they threw it away and unplugged the oven.
Nora began complaining of chest pain about 45 minutes later, Stephanie said. And shortly after she said she was having trouble breathing. Stephanie immediately took out the pulse oximeter to check her oxygen levels and it was at an 89—super low.
They headed to the ER immediately, and on the way there Stephanie said Ryan started complaining about having difficulty breathing. He said he thought it was going to pass, but it wasn’t. Stephanie thought that was odd that it happened to both of them, and when they got to the ER, she tried to take a deep breath and realized she couldn’t. “Hmmm, shortness of breath for me as well…” she said.
The ER admitted Nora and put her on oxygen. Once she was taken care of, Stephanie told Ryan he needed to get himself checked as well because it seemed like he was having the same issues as Nora. Stephanie noted that Ryan must have been having severe issues because he would have never gotten triaged himself. “Luckily he did, because his oxygen level was at 93,” Stephanie shared. Then he was admitted to the room right across the hall from Nora.
And in typical mom fashion, Stephanie said she wasn’t feeling great but she didn’t want to be separated from Nora. So they triaged her in the room with her daughter. She didn’t need oxygen, she was OK, but they hooked all of them up to IVs, had chest x-rays, EKGs, labs, the whole nine yards of testing because the medical staff was puzzled. Stephanie said the ER staff assumed carbon monoxide poisoning because they all got hit within an hour of each other, and it was something in the house that caused them all to get sick so quickly. They all had nausea, chills, and shortness of breath.
The chest x-ray showed that Nora and Ryan both had “compromised lungs” that looked like pneumonia. Stephanie’s x-ray came back clear. The doctors said it was probably because they were in the room with the oven baking, and Stephanie was in another room. She just got exposed while it was cooking and she was in the living room. The fire department was sent to their house to check the air quality inside and outside, and everything came back clear. But at that point it had been eight hours since they turned off the oven, Stephanie said. That would’ve cleared anyway, she said. Lead, carbon monoxide, mold, everything was negative. “All signs point to the Easy Bake Oven,” Stephanie said.
Ryan and Stephanie were discharged at 3 a.m. and Nora was transferred to a children’s hospital at 7 a.m. She started improving once they arrived at the children’s hospital, and she was able to be taken off oxygen, Stephanie said. The chest x-ray at the children’s hospital showed improvement from the initial hospital they were admitted in and she was discharged.
They don’t know if it was a defect or if it was a malfunction of some sort, but there was some type of poison that was emitted from the Easy Bake Oven when it was plugged in, she said.
“The crazy part is we didn’t even eat the product, and we didn’t even cook it for the entire amount of time,” Stephanie said. “If we would have baked the second part of the cake we would have then been exposed to it for another 20 minutes.”
“What would have happened then? What if we hadn’t taken our daughter seriously when she said she was having trouble breathing?” Stephanie said at the end of the video. “This could have been much worse.”