Regina toddler awaits surgery after swallowing teddy bear eye

Two-year-old Hailey Wudwud is just like any other smiley Baby Shark-loving toddler. But there’s one exception: she uses a feeding tube in her stomach to eat.

When Wudwud was a year old, she swallowed a plastic teddy bear eyeball about the size of a nickel.

Her parents only first noticed something was wrong last July when she choked on her dinner.

“The night she was choking, a piece of food came out and she started breathing (again). So I just stopped and I didn’t think anything extra about it at all,” said the girl’s father, Lance Payne, who performed the Heimlich Maneuver on her at the time.

But months later, Payne said he started noticing the toddler having asthma-like symptoms, prompting him and the girl’s mother to take her for a bronchoscope in February. That’s how they discovered the eye, with tissue grown around it.

Payne said he still remembers that moment.

“We completely shut down — we felt so guilty,” he said. “How do you not know that (as parents)? How do you miss that? I don’t understand how we missed it.”

A plastic teddy bear eye the size of a nickel was removed from two-year-old Hailey Wudwud’s throat in February 2019. (Cyndi Gabora/GoFundMe)

Two surgeries later, the eye was removed from Wudwud’s throat, leaving behind a hole in her airway.

For three months, the toddler was in the children’s ward at Saskatoon’s Royal University Hospital.

During that time, Wudwud’s second birthday came and passed — something her grandmother, Cyndi Gabora, often thinks about.

“She couldn’t eat nothing and we wanted to give her a birthday party with cake,” Gabora remembered. “So we’re waiting to celebrate her second birthday, but it might be her third (birthday) that we celebrate now.”

Though Wudwud was able to return home to Regina at the end of April, she continues to regularly take trips to Saskatoon for appointments.

The family has a GoFundMe page set up to help cover the costs associated with their travel, along with the girl’s medication and formula.

Despite being in and out of the hospital for the majority of her life, Payne said most people wouldn’t even know his daughter’s sick.

“If you didn’t know what was going on with her, she’d just be another little girl running past you. She’s absolutely unscathed by it,” he explained. “She just takes it with a stride — she’s out playing with her sisters and playing with her dog; you’d never know anything had happened to her.”

In August, Payne hopes they’ll make the drive to her final surgery, which will involve doctors taking a skin graft from her stomach to help rebuild her esophagus.

Looking back on the past year, Payne said he wants other parents to use his family’s situation as a learning experience to never bring stuffed animals with hard eyes into their homes.

“(The eyes) can always be stitched — they don’t have to be that hard, marble-sized eye,” he noted.

Payne added that taking legal action against the teddy bear company isn’t a priority at this stage.

“I’m hoping we can talk to them at least after (the surgeries are complete), but right now we’re not even considering it,” he said. “We’re putting Hailey first.”