A TikToker has shared her horrifying experience of being sick for months on end — and all because of thick mold growing inside of her reusable water bottle. Kae, who posts as @kaebrie, revealed that starting in August 2023, she kept getting colds and bronchitis that wouldn’t go away. It wasn’t until she decided to give her Owala bottle a wash that the truth was revealed.
Kae was so unwell, she went to urgent care.
In a clip viewed more than 3 million times, Kae revealed that in August, she got a “minor cold” that wouldn’t budge. When she went to urgent care, she was diagnosed with bronchitis and given some medicine to treat it.
“Of course, they give me an inhaler and then some pills and I, of course, break out in hives as a result of the pills,” she recalled. She also revealed that the bronchitis took “longer than it should to go away” but after about three weeks, she felt she was in the clear… until she got a sinus infection.
She clearly was getting worse rather than better.
@kaebrie psa to fellow owala girlies to TAKE OUT THE SILICONE PIECE 😋 #owala #owalawaterbottle #fyp #foryou #college @Owala
Kae went back to urgent care twice more, the final time with a painful sore throat, where the doctor remarked how “angry” it looked. She was given some antibiotics and said she felt back to her old self for roughly a week before getting even worse.
After seeing the doctor for a third time, she randomly decided to give her water bottle a clean.
“This is where it goes downhill,” she said.
She knows she doesn’t clean her water bottle enough, but she was shocked by what she found.
Kae started off by admitting that she’s aware reusable water bottles harbor bacteria and that she should clean it more, but everyone is guilty of not doing it enough.
However, she did a quick Google on how to clean her Owala bottle and found people on Redding saying she needed to remove the silicone piece from the lid and boil it.
“I didn’t know it came out,” Kae said. Uh oh.
When she pulled the piece out, she found it “covered in mold” that had “embedded itself in the silicone.” OMG!
Thankfully, she didn’t continue to use it. She ordered some replacement silicone parts on Amazon to replace them. Miraculously, this seemed to do the trick.
“Once I cleaned it… got better. Haven’t been since since. I had mold poisoning from my water bottle,” she concluded.
Let this be a lesson, kids — I’m about to go deep clean my Stanley Quencher!
