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Laura Lynn McCall
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Email: worldnbw@yahoo.com
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
New Mom hears staff labeling her newborn son a drug baby.
SUN VALLEY – The policies in place at Olive View Hospital's Natal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) are unacceptable and must be quite shocking to new parents if the mother informs the hospital she is enrolled in a methadone maintenance program. April Hamilton was singled out by hospital staffers as an annoyance for asking too many questions about her baby's extended stay. Gavin Hamilton arrived on February 01, 2011 and was receiving questionable medication that had consisted of phenobarbital, fentanyl, a drug that is 100 times more potent than morphine, (sometimes two at once) and finally methadone after two months of what can only be described as experimentation with the other drugs. Gavin was finally released from Olive View with a prescription for clonidine after spending over three months in the NICU. The hospital claimed they were supposedly “detoxing” the baby, but Hamilton says nurses said her baby was going to be there a long time before she even gave birth. Staffers constantly referred to her son as a sick baby or a drug baby and treated her as if she was a full blown drug addict that had come in off the streets.
Hamilton had been clean from street drugs for the last year and had done plenty of research regarding methadone since she had planned on having a baby. “All the research I have done says that babies only need a couple of weeks to detox and then their mothers are allowed to bring them home,” said Hamilton, “I cannot help but wonder if they are actually making things worse for him, they didn't even test him to see if he had any methadone in his system first, and according to some doctors he might not of needed to detox at all. I only take 25 mg and sometimes only every other day.”
Hamilton says her troubles really began when her own mother called the hospital to ask about a release date and nurses filled her with lies saying her daughter did heroin during her pregnancy. This not only broke hospital patient confidentiality, it also broke her mothers heart. Hamilton had lost all confidence in the hospital and finally had her specialist call the doctors directly and try to explain that the only dose that newborns should be on of methadone is one that is constantly decreased.
Hamilton believes the hospital doctors disliked having Doctor Stillion, a methadone specialist that has 20 years of experience with the drug, confront them about hospital policies. After that call, Sharon Hess, the hospital social worker, immediately called Child Protective Services (CPS) on Hamilton and told them she was a drug user had created an unsafe atmosphere for her child.
Honestly, when you realize that this call was made as a vicious attack meant to use CPS as a tool to shut down a mother who practically lived at the hospital while they had her baby, it is enough to outrage the best of us.
Hamilton said she had to even approve an emergency blood transfusion because the nurses had drawn too much blood from Gavin and when she arrived nurses had left a needle sticking out of his little forehead along with blood droppings in his hair and on the pillowcase. “I almost fainted and immediately began crying. I did not have any power over my own baby's care”, said Hamilton. The policies in place at this hospital are wrong for baby's, but anyone who tries to speak up to them is immediately shut down with CPS caseworkers and court-dates to get rid of them once and for all. The social worker who called CPS had written a report just prior to making that call saying how great Hamilton and her boyfriend, Joey Giancaspro, had been about visiting everyday and calling if they could not make it. Sue, head nurse of the NICU, admitted that Hamilton asked more questions than anybody else ever did about their baby and that she normally did not speak to new parents everyday. She went on to say that most parents did not even speak English, so she did not talk to them at all.
The blog regarding this matter and any other cases that parents want to talk about can be found at http://worldnbw.blogspot.com/.
