Mom Speaks Out After Infant Nearly Dies from Ingesting a Single Water Bead: 'It Still Shocks Me'

Folichia Mitchell (2) Kennedy during her hospitallization and today

A mom whose world was upended when an unknown hazard got to her infant daughter in her own home is speaking out to warn other parents about the dangerous toy.

The last few months of Fohlicia Mitchell's life have been focused on the recovery of her daughter, Kennedy. In late October, at 9 months old, Kennedy was taken to the hospital when she started exhibiting symptoms the mom of four initially suspected could have been a food allergy.

"The 29th of October is when I started to think she wasn't feeling good. The night before I had given her white rice for the first time. So when she woke up the next day and she spit up a little bit and it had rice, my first thought was that she was having a reaction to that," Mitchell tells PEOPLE.

"I didn't rush right to the doctor, she didn't have a fever. She was still eating and playing all the time. She wasn't screaming out. So I just thought she wasn't feeling good — typical kid stuff, just not feeling great."

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On Halloween, Kennedy was lethargic, spending a lot of the day sleeping, which raised Mitchell's concern.

"I had never experienced a kid being lethargic, so I wasn't completely sure, but once that thought popped into my head, I just decided to take her to the local emergency room," she recalls.

And so began what turned into four nerve-wracking weeks in the hospital fighting to get Kennedy back to health. The first emergency room they went to did some blood work and quickly determined the infant would need more, transferring her to a larger hospital system with more resources.

"That's when I started to feel like something more serious was wrong. At that time, I wasn't asking a lot of questions. I was coordinating, more like calling her dad and then getting my mom to come to be with her three older brothers."

It wasn't until they got to Portland Hospital that signs of an obstruction appeared. Kennedy vomited brown liquid and showed other symptoms that led them to send the 9-month-old for an ultrasound, after which doctors asked Mitchell if Kennedy could have swallowed anything small.

"I was still hung up on [the idea] she's having an allergic reaction, so I was like, yeah, she just ate white rice. The doctor was like, no, like a marble or a bead."

After some thought, Mitchell remembered buying her older son a water bead set, which the doctor quickly said seemed plausible.

"He showed me on the screen and you could see this circular obstruction in her intestines," she recalls to PEOPLE. "And he explained it's black inside, which tells us that it's filled with fluid, so a water bead would make sense."

Doctors conferred with pediatric surgeons, who debated the location of the object in the baby's small intestine, soon determining she'd need surgery. After almost four hours, they completed the surgery, during which they removed a single water bead from Kennedy's small intestine.

"They said that they went through the intestines and felt with their hands and that they didn't find any more or believed that there was any more," Mitchell shares, saying the family was briefly relieved before realizing they weren't out of the woods yet.

"After almost 12 hours, she didn't improve. She was just as sick as she was, and they had to put the NG tube back down to suck out the bile that she would have still been throwing up, because at that point her intestines weren't working anymore."

Another exploratory surgery was performed to confirm that no water beads were missed and that the site of the incision closed properly.

"They didn't know that it had caused this massive infection that came in the next day and a half, where she progressively got worse," Mitchell shares.

Mitchell was by her daughter's side while her husband was home with their other three kids as Kennedy took a turn for the worse, third spacing, and was believed to have gone into septic shock.

"I think it was confusing for them. They are now 2, 4 and 9, so they were confused," Mitchell says of her boys. "They had an understanding that Kennedy swallowed something that she wasn't supposed to, and it made her really sick, and so she had to be at the doctor so that they could help her."

Though it was later determined Kennedy was not going septic, her organs weren't functioning properly and another infection was suspected.

"This was the second time they suspected she wouldn't make it through the night," Mitchell recalls, explaining that Kennedy's intestines were taken out and placed in a silo bag to help relieve swelling in her body, during which she was on a ventilator.

"It was kind of experimental," Mitchell explains of the treatment. "They didn't know if it would work, but it immediately started relieving the pressure. It was just a waiting game to see if she'd make it to the next day and through the next night."

During the time Kennedy's intestines were in the silo bag, doctors discovered and removed pieces of her intestines that had "corroded" and "died off." Then came the last surgery to put the intestines back in her body.

Kennedy recovered from that surgery well and finally made it home four weeks after first being admitted.

"It's so hard to think that that was really our life," Mitchell says. "I go back over it, and it still shocks me."

While focusing on Kennedy and thinking about the rest of her family at home, Mitchell felt grateful for social media. She shared Kennedy's story on TikTok, sharing daily updates to a community sending prayers and good vibes for her recovery.

"Sharing it online took the pressure off of me being alone and it gave me a chance to be able to digest the information that I was being given," Mitchell says. "I'm making a video, going over that information again and then people just really started caring just so much about Kenny."

"That gave me something hopeful to hold on to, and every day and every week, there were people who literally have no idea who my infant baby daughter is and they care so much. They want to know how she's doing. I definitely think it gave some kind of energy that helped her."

Mitchell, who was already living with C-PTSD prior to Kennedy's medical emergency, says it's been "really hard" moving forward now that they're back home and focused on furthering Kennedy's recovery.

"It's made what should be ordinary life feel terrifying," Mitchell says. "It's been really scary because we never let her have the water beads and weren't expecting it. It was so shocking to be told she has just one water bead in her body, and here's all that's happened."

"Then, two days would pass, and it would be, 'she also has this condition.' Her heart had stopped working in the second or third surgery, so they had to run an emergency artery line in her right arm because of, I believe, whatever chemicals were in the bead."

"Her blood wasn't clotting, but then she formed a clot. When they did that, they had to run that emergency line," she continues. "So for two days, her hand was gray and it was like, 'Her body is swelling and building pressure. She also might lose this arm if this medicine doesn't help.' "

"Then she needed surgery, but she has no platelets. So she's got a clot we're trying to get rid of, but her body can't clot to go into surgery. So we've got to give her platelets, and then she's got no red blood cells, so we've got to give her a red blood cell infusion. So many things happening out of nowhere that came from something we weren't expecting, and it just scares you," she concludes.

Kennedy, now 13 months, is making great progress on her road to recovery, Mitchell is happy to report.

"She's in physical therapy because she was lying in bed for nearly a month, so she lost a lot of core strength, but she's up on all fours crawling again. We're working with her physical therapist to get her standing and walking since she just turned 1."

Mitchell is grateful to be able to work on spreading awareness and enjoying the bits of normalcy her family gets back as time passes.

"I have moments every single day where it just kind of washes over me like how lucky I am to have been able to bring her home and to have her home," the mom shares. "We had her first birthday party last month and even with Valentine's Day, I'm just constantly reflecting on it."

"I don't let anybody else watch her. I'm still really on edge, just after being looked at in the face and being told a couple of times that your daughter might not make it. I definitely go back to that a lot, but I try to let go and enjoy it. We snuggle a lot, I like to keep her really close all the time."

Aside from working on her own family, Mitchell is also trying to spread the word about how dangerous water beads can be to other families. She's also pursuing legal action against the manufacturer of the toy, which Mitchell notes has a choking hazard but no warning of the dangers of ingesting.

Mitchell has teamed up with Ashley Haugen — whose daughter Kipley experienced a similar incident to Kennedy and was later diagnosed with Toxic Brain Encephalopathy, a brain injury resulting in exposure to solvents and heavy metals — to spread awareness and share a Change.org petition to ban the toy.

"That really pushed me to keep talking about it because that is what made me feel really angry with the company is that I feel like I didn't get to make an informed choice when I bought the water beads," Mitchell says. "I didn't get to know. And so if I had seen, 'If they're ingested, you should seek medical attention or could cause organ damage or could block the lungs — because I know specifically of a child who had it get lodged in his lung — then maybe I would have been able to make a different choice."