Mother To Be Maggie Downs Goes Into Labor, Tests Positive For Meth

[SimplySpaztastic]

Maggie Downs

Baby Everest

Maggie & Baby Everest

CALIFORNIA -
Pregnancy.
It should be the most exciting time of a woman's life. You're gearing up to meet that tiny person who's been growing inside your body for almost a year and preparing for the biggest change you will probably ever experience.

It can also be the scariest time, too, especially if you've lost a baby or struggled with infertility.

Carrying my son was the most amazing thing, and I appreciated every single moment because motherhood was something I desperately desired.

But miscarrying my first - a baby girl - was like getting hit by a truck - and after learning I was pregnant for the second time, I was scared as hell to "step back into the street," so to speak, at risk of being knocked down again.

At the beginning of my pregnancy, trips to the bathroom were plagued with fear. In the second trimester, worries evolved. Was he kicking enough? Did that pothole I ran over cause permanent damage to my growing baby? Or how about last night when I rolled onto my belly? The list went on and on.

I watched what I ate like a hawk. Gone were the days of deli meat, sushi and beverages containing caffeine or artificial anything.

I treated my body like a glass bubble that could shatter at any moment.

It's easy to develop that mindset after experiencing a loss, where the innocence is ripped away and your entire existence is dedicated to your baby's survival.

That was the case for Maggie Downs, a southern California mother-to-be who was prepared for anything, but never expected the nightmare that occurred when she went into labor with her son in 2014.

POSITIVE FOR METHAMPHETAMINE

At two weeks past her due date, Downs checked into the hospital, ready to meet her baby boy. She spent the last nine months living clean as a whistle, eating organically and staying away from everything on the list of pregnancy "no-no's."

About seven or eight hours into her labor, a nurse followed her into the bathroom.

"Just so you know, you've tested positive," she tells her.

Thoughts fill Maggie's head - but nothing could prepare her for what came next.

"You tested positive for methamphetamine."

Maggie laughs to herself, thinking that the hardest "drug" she ingested during pregnancy was Tylenol. She offers another urine sample.

While waiting for the results, Maggie's labor progresses. Her husband plays "Push It," the Spotify playlist she created, and focuses on a picture of Beyonce, her inspiration for the day.

Contractions rip through her body like electric shocks, causing the baby's heartbeat to drop each time.

In the mist of this, the nurse returns to her room with the latest test results.

Maggie comes up positive for methamphetamine again.

“This isn’t right,” she screams.

Her husband is livid.

“You tell them," he yells to the nurse. "I don’t care who you have to call. The lab, the social worker, the doctors. You tell them they’re wrong.”

The nurse tells her that the baby will be tested for drugs and that Child Protective Services will be contacted to evaluate her fitness as a parent. She's told she can not breastfeed her baby.

Maggie is speechless and in a state of shock. What on earth could possibly be causing this horrific mix-up?

Her hands shake as she makes the connection.

PLEADING FOR ONE MORE TEST

"My inhaler," she says, realizing that's what's causing the positive result.


Maggie suffers from asthma and takes puffs from a prescribed albuterol inhaler, which was obviously cleared with her doctors during pregnancy.

Her husband and doula race against the clock, scouring the internet for information about asthma inhalers and drug tests.

He flips through through articles from Drugs.com and CBS News as proof, frantically waving his phone in front of every nurse who walks by.

Maggie pleads for one more test to prove her innocence.

"The more I insist I'm not on drugs," she says. "the more I sound like I am."

“You can take this up with CPS,” a nurse tells her, showing absolutely no emotion.

Hours pass by, and the nightmare - something Maggie can't believe is real - continues.

At 9:56 the next morning, her son is born via emergency c-section. What should have been the happiest and purest moment of her life had somehow turned into the most convoluted scenario imaginable.

"When I change my son’s diaper for the very first time, there is a plastic bag covering his genitals," she explains, "a band of tape cinching it tight. It doesn’t strike me as abnormal until the nurse peering over my shoulder shakes her head no."

“I don’t think that’s enough urine for a sample,” the nurse says. “We’ll have to do it again.”

"Of course," Maggie realizes. "They have to test my child for drugs, and this is how it’s done. It’s one of the saddest things I’ve ever seen, this tiny baby part wrapped in plastic, this uncomfortable, squawking child. His skin is so silky and new, the plastic so crinkly and manufactured."

For the next three days, Maggie recovers from surgery while trying to breastfeed her son. Nurses are reluctant to hand him to his mother, calling her irresponsible.

“This woman tested positive for methamphetamine,” nurses say to one another during shift changes. “She has been briefed on the risks associated with breastfeeding, and she refused our advice. She is breastfeeding at her own risk.”

A social worker visits on the day Maggie is set to take her son home. He says her son's drug test is negative and that he doesn't think she's on meth.

But his hands are tied.

EVERY NIGHT SHREDS ME TO PIECES

“Just expect (CPS) to show up at any moment, is all I’m saying,” he tells her.

Maggie and her husband take their baby boy home, watching the anticipated perfect moment wash away before their eyes.

"The weeks that follow are dark," she says. "I don’t know if I would have experienced the same level of postpartum depression without failing those drug tests. But I do know most other mothers don’t spend their first few weeks with baby the way I do – the shades drawn, peeking out from behind the blinds, examining each car that drives past. Every phone call, every knock at the door, every pop of gravel in the driveway sets my heart racing. Every night shreds me to pieces, wondering if my son will be whisked away by morning ... It seems insane to think someone could take my child away, yet testing positive for meth once seemed insane too."

Three weeks pass, and the hospital social worker calls. He tells Maggie's husband that further testing revealed that she was not taking drugs.

"My son is asleep against my shoulder, and I don’t want to disrupt him," Maggie says. "Instead I walk over to the patio door, pull open the blinds, and for the first time in weeks, let the light in."

http://www.9news.com/mb/news/i-went-into-labor-and-tested-positive-for-meth/214058876

More here: http://narrative.ly/i-went-to-the-hospital-to-give-birthand-tested-positive-for-meth/

 

[Victoria]

Talk about pricking a hole in your joy balloon. I completely understand that medical staff deal with mothers delivering newborns that test positive for drugs far more frequently than I even like to think about but fuck!! These are health care professionals and should err on the side of caution especially when this mother under great duress offered up a reasonable explanation as to why she may have tested positive for methamphetamine.

On the other hand the new mommy has to take into consideration that the hospital would have been negligent to not follow certain protocol with the collection of her sons urine to test for the possible presence of methamphetamine.

 

[Satanica]

http://www.jsonline.com/watchdog/wa...ilures-to-put-patients-at-risk-303445851.html

[....]
Lab tests influence about 70% of medical decisions, guiding treatments big and small: How much blood thinner should a heart-attack patient receive? Does the baby need antibiotics? Should you start taking cholesterol-lowering medication?

Even nonmedical tests can be life-changing: employment drug screening; blood work for life insurance, paternity testing.

The results need to be right.

But laboratories across the nation aren't following basic policies and procedures designed to ensure the accuracy of test results. Patients have no way to know if their lab is taking shortcuts and private accrediting organizations that inspect labs fail to cite serious violations that put patients' health and lives at risk, an investigation by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has found. One of those main accreditors missed enough violations to require review by federal regulators last year.

Even when serious violations are identified, offending labs are rarely sanctioned except in the most extreme cases. In 2013, just 90 sanctions were issued — accounting for not even 1% of the 35,000 labs that do high-level lab testing in the United States.
[....]
organizations that police labs on behalf of the federal government are allowed to keep their inspection reports private. In fact, federal law requires it in most cases. When state and federal inspection records exist, they can be difficult and time-consuming to get. The Journal Sentinel has spent months battling for records to ascertain what is happening in labs across the country.

Doctors and patients might never realize there was a mistake with a test result. Even if they do, labs often fight in court to avoid responsibility — or settle the case with strict confidentiality agreements that hide the specifics of how people were harmed and who was responsible.
[....]
There is no way to quantify how many patients are being harmed by laboratory errors. Privacy laws prevent patient information from being disclosed in inspection reports and it's up to the labs themselves to discover, and then report, if anyone was hurt or killed.
[....]
While occasional mistakes are inevitable in any field, the Journal Sentinel investigation identified problems in laboratories that are systemic and the result of attempts to cut costs and save money.

Expired products are used to screen for cancer and test children for lead poisoning. Blood that is supposed to be kept cold before a transfusion isn't. Samples are incorrectly labeled or swapped between patients. Basic quality control isn't done to ensure accuracy on tests for blood sugar, herpes and genetic defects.

"We have every right to assume that our safety, our health, is not being compromised by something stupid," said Sharon Ehrmeyer, a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. She is one of several laboratory and quality control experts who reviewed thousands of pages of inspection reports for the Journal Sentinel.

Federal regulations crafted over the past 25 years were meant to establish sound laboratory practices that would deliver accurate and reliable results. But when regulations are ignored, "the outcome of the testing has to really be questioned," Ehrmeyer said.
[....]
in 2013, a Green Bay obstetrics clinic failed a check to see if employees were accurately testing for pregnancy — clearly a necessary and fundamental skill. After failing the proficiency testing in the first quarter of 2013, the lab simply didn't participate in an outside check of its pregnancy testing the following quarter.

It's unclear if any patients were incorrectly tested for pregnancy at the clinic, or if a fetus was harmed if a test indicated a mother wasn't pregnant when she actually was. For instance, if a woman who thinks she isn't pregnant takes certain medications, drinks alcohol or receives X-rays, the baby could be affected.


Document: A mistake was made in a 2006 paternity case when the mother’s cheek swab was used in place of the child’s. The lab reported that the man was not the child’s father.

One year later, a corrected report was issued by LabCorp saying the man was the father.
Robert DeMott, former owner of OB-GYN Associates of Green Bay, wouldn't answer questions about how and why his clinic failed the pregnancy test check. He sold the clinic later that year to Bellin Health System and is still employed by the company. A spokesman said the new clinic has passed its regulatory checks for pregnancy testing.

In Louisiana in 2013, a hospital was incorrectly handling blood being screened for ammonia and lactate. Such tests help doctors determine if a critically ill patient's organs are failing and if tissues aren't getting enough oxygen. To do these tests accurately, blood needs to be centrifuged — or separated — within 15 minutes of collection so the levels of ammonia or lactate reflect conditions inside the body.

At Byrd Regional Hospital, it took almost three hours to centrifuge the blood for one patient, and almost an hour and a half for another. Waits like that invalidate the samples.
[....]
Regulators and accrediting groups insist that labs are closely monitored and forced to fix problems. Few are sanctioned, they say, because the goal isn't to punish labs or put them out of business, but to educate lab operators and encourage processes that minimize errors. However, sanctions provide one of the only clues to the public about which labs may be underperforming.

HIGH COST OF ERRORS
With between 7 billion and 10 billion lab tests done each year in the United States, even an error rate of 0.1% has major consequences:
“That’s 7 to 10 million patients.”Paul Epner,past president of the Clinical Laboratories Management Association
While not all testing mistakes will injure or kill, the precise nature of the work means labs must follow regulations and treat every potential risk as an "avoidable risk," said Paul Epner, past president of the Clinical Laboratories Management Association.

Though Epner believes laboratories are one of the highest quality parts of the nation's health care system, the sheer volume of tests means that even a defect rate of 0.1% will produce millions of problems each year.

"When you apply it to 7 to 10 billion tests, that's 7 to 10 million patients," he said.
[....]

There is much more at the link. I cut out a lot in what I did post.

A fairly recent scandal:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/larryhu...an-embattled-laboratory-company/#4044580357fa

 

[JackBurton]

the Spotify playlist she created, and focuses on a picture of Beyonce, her inspiration for the day.

What a fucking idiot piece of trash.

So what was the cause, this inhaler shows up as meth in basic testing? The couple sue the makers of the inhaler for not putting a disclaimer about this fact? What a shity story, no resolve or followup.