Dog poo, parasite.

Question

Okay I am spiralling and am not sure what to do. I have contamination OCD (amongst others) and in particular surrounding myself or my kids losing their vision. Long story somewhat shorter, one of my kids sat in dog poo on the sidewalk yesterday. I didn’t realise and picked her up and carried her home and didn’t even realise until being home for 10 minutes that it was on us both (my hands and arm) I had touched my keys and door handles and my daughter had touched goodness knows what. As soon as I realised I showered us both and discarded clothes. I tried to just move on after this, however later that day I drove my car and realised afterwards that I had touched my keys whilst still having poo on my hand without realising (there’s a lot on a keychain) and then touched things in my car etc. I checked my keys afterwards which were not the cleanest overall and I’m fairly certain there were specks of dog poo on parts if them. I cleaned them as best as I could, but now I terrified to touch them. It’s also impossible to clean every area that specks might have touched. My fear is toxocaris (round worm larvae) being ingested and causing blindness in my kids or myself. This is potentially an over exaggerated fear based in some reality. The sheer dumb luck of the whole situation is making me so upset. My daughter usually doesn’t walk in this area, especially on the grass as there is always dog poo there and usually I would have checked to make sure there was no poo if she even walked there, but instead she sits right in it and I don’t notice and end up with it all over myself and then touched things like my keys that feel impossible to clean properly (electronic fob, garage remote,lots of keys on it with a million nooks and crannies). At this point my keys and parts of my car/house feel contaminated and that’s ignoring the fact that she could have touched her mouth yesterday before I noticed. This disease terrifies me and it can be months before symptoms even show. I want to throw my keys in the bin, but obviously can’t. I truly don’t know what to do and am beyond angry at people letting their dogs poo on the sidewalk. The fact they don’t pick up after their dogs makes me sure they don’t keep up with their worming schedule snd the sidewalk area didn’t look well kept so the poo could have been there for ages (it wasn’t fresh). I checked when we walked back past later that day.

Posted Jun 3, 2026, 1:36 AM UTC

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