Girl, 2, Ends Up in Full Body Cast After Going Down the Slide. Now Mom Explains Hidden Danger (Exclusive)

"I just wanted to make her feel better. If I could have taken it all away and put it on me, I would've," Zamora tells PEOPLE

A mom of two never expected her trip to an amusement park to end at the emergency room.

When Amelia Zamora brought her daughter to an amusement park in California years ago, she hoped for a day of fun rides and joyful memories. However, things took a turn for the worse when her then-2-year-old daughter suffered a serious injury on the park's slide, which Zamora shared on her TikTok account.

"A friend of ours invited us to go because I had my oldest who was 2 at the time, and then I had a 2-month-old," Zamora begins. "So she's like, 'Let's get out of the house, go get the kids, have them play.' So we go, and it was a very old staple slide at this park, and she really wanted to go down it."

Explaining that it was an old attraction at the park, the mom of two remembers that the slide was steep, emphasizing, "it's a very old metal slide."

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"We walked up and she was crying for me to go with her because she was scared. Obviously, she's 2, I'm not going to make her go down the steep slide by herself. So I just put her in my lap and we went down the slide," Zamora tells PEOPLE, adding that she quickly realized the bottom of the slide was cement.

"I tried to stop us and the momentum and sheer force of us together, I knew I was going to end up landing on top of her, so I tried to turn my body," she explains. "The side of my body was all messed up, and then she ended up landing on her knee and fractured and broke her femur bone. So obviously, she was screaming and it didn't really swell up too bad, at least that I noticed."

After taking her daughter home, Zamora says the little girl was "sweating a lot and I was like, 'Something's not right.'"

"My husband's like, 'We need to take her in.' So we went into the ER and they checked her out and admitted her. Me and my husband actually got questioned because apparently that type of break is big in child abuse."

"When they took her in, they did an X-ray, realized it was broken and then they sent us home in this soft wrap cast," Zamora says, recalling that the hospital said they could only cast her daughter on Friday, which was a full four days away.

"I was like, 'You want me to leave her in this for a week?' So I called, they rescheduled. They were like, 'Oh no, absolutely not. She can't move it or it could make it worse.'"

Her daughter was rescheduled for the next day and received an almost full-body spica cast. "The cast goes from her rib cage right below her chest all the way down the broken leg to her ankle, and then the other side, it goes to her kneecap," Zamora explains.

"And so they had to put her under, cast her and all that. And then we were in that for four or five weeks," she recalls.

Zamora says it was "traumatizing" to watch her daughter be put in the cast. "Seeing your baby girl in any hospital situation, not only is terrifying because it's a hospital, it's scary."

"I just wanted to make her feel better. If I could have taken it all away and put it on me, I would've," she says. "Watching her get wheeled back into the OR-type room was heartbreaking. I cried. Thankfully, my sister-in-law was with me because it was hard to sit there and it was an hour or so process of her being back there. It was gut-wrenching."

After her daughter received her spica cast, the mom of two says she had to adjust a lot in her day-to-day life to adapt to their new normal. "It was a lot because not only am I postpartum with an infant, [but] then life changed," Zamora says. "She couldn't fit in her car seat, we couldn't go anywhere."

"We couldn't really do much because she couldn't sit, she couldn't bend at the waist. It was challenging."

Zamora's daughter wasn't allowed to get any part of the cast wet, which meant that the family had to get creative with things like taking a shower and going to the bathroom. "She wasn't potty-trained at the time, and so [we had to] change diapers and shove diapers in every corner just so that the cast didn't get wet, and thankfully, I found ways," she says.

Instead of taking showers, the family "got a blow up hair tank wash so at least I could wash her hair and her face and her upper body," Zamora explains. "And then thankfully, the car seat we had at the time had a place to do the extended lap belt, so she ended up being able to get into the car seat with a towel behind her." But her daughter refused to be moved into the car seat until two weeks after getting her cast.

Because she didn't want to be moved, Zamora and her family were stuck at home for almost the entire time she was in the cast. To find some way to get outside, Zamora's mother-in-law constructed a padded Radio Flyer wagon. "We padded this Radio Flyer and we were able, thankfully, we had a Target close. So we walked to Target just to get out of the house and different scenery and all that."

Still, Zamora says her daughter hated being outside the house because "she didn't want anyone to see that she had a cast on," going so far as to wear a blanket over her in public. "She was very self-conscious about it, even at 2. She would always be in a blanket because she didn't want anyone to see. So that was heartbreaking too, to just see her be very self-conscious of the fact that she's in this fully body cast."

As a mom, Zamora says it was hard to have to watch her daughter struggle every day. "I had a lot of guilt surrounding it, so it was a lot of me trying to process my own emotions on top of her emotions," she says. "She would be very frustrated why she couldn't do certain things and why we couldn't go anywhere and frustrated with the situation."

"At night, she would cry, 'I want to play and I don't want to be in it.' And it was heartbreaking," she remembers. "There were definitely nights that I stayed up way too late, just processing it and writing everything down that helped."

By writing posts on her blog, Zamora found a way to get through the pain. "That was my way of emotionally coping with it and trying to get over it and realizing, obviously once I saw years later, she's fine. She plays soccer, she swims, she has no real long-term effect from it."

To keep her daughter's spirits high, Zamora says they had a countdown for the day she got her cast off, promising her sweet treats for the big day. "She got the cast off in the morning and she did get her cake pop, and was the happiest little clam to be able to sit normally in her car seat."

"Then [we] went home and I had gotten her a toy, so when we got home she could actually sit and play with stuff, but she was definitely weary to sit — you're pretty much in a laying position for four weeks."

Zamora tells PEOPLE that although she's been told to be careful going down slides with kids, no one ever told her how unsafe it really could be. Though Zamora says she's heard about kids' feet getting caught, she says that isn't what broke her daughter's leg.

"I had heard about it when I was pregnant, but I was pregnant, and so I put it out of my head because I was like, 'Oh well, that's not going to happen for a while,'" she says. "[That's why] I wanted to do the [TikTok] video again now years later that I was like, more people need to know about this because it's not just the side of their foot getting caught."

"In reality, it could also be just sheer momentum and force of an adult body with a small child on it and you're trying to stop at the end of a slide that doesn't have a landing thing."

Now that it's been six years since the accident, Zamora says her daughter doesn't quite remember her time in the cast. "I don't know if she actually truly remembers being in it or if it's one of those, 'I know I was in it because I've seen pictures,' but for a while after, she would talk about it."

"She would tell people, 'I had a full cast and now I don't and I can run.' She definitely knew she was in it and was very excited when she was out of it. And for a while, she wouldn't use her leg. She wanted everyone to carry her everywhere so that she remembered."

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