Clutching a small stuffed dog, an 11-year-old Topanga Canyon girl calmly told a Malibu, California, jury that she can barely remember what it’s like to see, since she was left near-blind and suffering from a painful condition that her parents and doctors claim was caused by Stevens-Johnson Syndrome, a rare, severe allergic reaction to Children’s Motrin, Fox News reports.

“It’s hard to remember what seeing is like, when you haven’t been able to see for a long time,” Sabrina Johnson testified during the trial of her family’s lawsuit against Johnson & Johnson and its subsidiaries. She and her father testified that Sabrina’s eyes were so painful in any dim light that she once chose to spend several weeks inside a box at her grandparents’ house, near a Florida eye clinic. “It was not a very fun Christmas,” Sabrina said. “Since I was in a box, I was one of the presents.”

The girl suffered chemical burns in her eyes and every orifice of her body after her parents gave her three doses of Children’s Motrin for a slight fever in 2003, when she had come home from elementary school with a fever, Fox News continues. The reaction sent her to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where even doctors did not know about medical links between the active ingredient, ibuprofen, and Stevens-Johnson Syndrome.

A lack of warnings to consumers, and the fact that physicians were not given warnings about the remote possibility of such a violent reaction until 2005, is at the heart of the five-week-long trial of the lawsuit. J&J contend the product is safe, and that warning labels on the box and inside the packaging adequately warned caregivers that they should consult doctors if any change of medical condition occurs after giving a young person Children’s Motrin, Fox News notes.

On the witness stand, Anthony Temple, a former executive medical director at J&J’s McNeil Consumer Products, testified the drugmaker knew that up to 20 people had been blinded, killed or seriously injured by Children’s Motrin between the time it was sold over-the-counter market in the 1990s, and when Sabrina Johnson was given three doses in 2003, according to Fox News.

He was also aware that more than 40 cases of Stevens-Johnson Syndrome occurred in the years after doctors at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center told the Topanga Canyon family that Motrin had caused Sabrina’s hospitalization, near-death, and continued pain. Temple also said McNeil didn’t add warnings to the label after an extensive clinical trial found that it could cause a severe allergic shock, similar to a violent bee sting reaction, in more than 5 out of every 100,000 children given the drug.

The label warnings were made more severe after doctors petitioned the federal government to add tougher language in 2005. Language about the symptoms of Stevens-Johnson Syndrome was added to Children’s Motrin sold via prescriptions, but not the same drug sold over-the-counter, Temple testified, according to Fox News.

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