Babies born to opioid-dependent mothers are typically whisked away to the NICU and given morphine. But an innovative program is seeing shocking results with far simpler treatment. Here's our story about the most vulnerable victims of the opioids epidemic
Babies born to opioid-dependent mothers are typically whisked away to intensive care units and given morphine. But an innovative program is seeing shocking results with far simpler treatment. What these babies need most, it turns out, is their moms.pioid withdrawal is one of the most painful things a person can endure. Your back is sore. Your teeth throb. Your bones ache. Even your skin hurts. A gnawing hunger eats at your raw stomach, and you’ve never felt thirstier.
“The last thing I wanted was for my daughter to be taken away and put on morphine because of my stupidity in the past”This is why Nicole Francis, a first-time mom, was terrified and full of self-loathing in the days following the birth of her daughter, Everley. Nicole obsessively watched the hours tick by in their hospital room in Kingston, Ont. Every eight hours, nurses bustled in to check Everley for symptoms of NAS.
Two men bent down to help Nicole up, and when one grabbed her right forearm, it felt burning hot. Looking down, she saw bone sticking out of the skin on her wrist. X-rays showed her arm was broken in six places. Repairing it would ultimately require two surgeries, two plates and 11 screws. To help with the pain, Nicole’s doctors prescribed Percocet, a pill-form combination of acetaminophen and opiate-based oxycodone.
“Nobody expects to become addicted to something. You don’t have a coffee for the first time and expect you’ll have to drink five cups every morning for the rest of your life to be functional. It was the same for Percocet—you need it like you need to drink water.” Desperate for pills to stop her spiral, she began scheming for ways to buy them. She scanned Facebook friends, she says, “trying to think of people I knew who were in with that crowd.” Nicole eventually found an uncle of a distant friend who sold painkillers on the street. She bought them illegally for more than a year before she decided to get treatment.
“It was the devil,” she says. “Once it got into my system, I felt so much better. But it was like I needed more. When it’s in you, it just takes over. It wasn’t me.” The most common of these opioid-replacement therapies is methadone. Just like Suboxone, methadone is specifically designed to block the euphoric high. It also cuts down on cravings and prevents users from going into withdrawal—and back to the opioid they initially grew addicted to.
It didn’t help when she learned that the baby would be at risk of NAS when he was born. Because she was on methadone, Jennifer says, she was told she could not deliver in Cobourg, Ont., where she was living, because there was no neonatal intensive care unit for the baby. She chose to deliver 75 kilometres east, in Belleville. At her orientation there, she was relieved to learn about the hospital’s innovative approach to treating mothers with addictions. “I was incredibly nervous.
The majority of babies avoid severe symptoms altogether. For example, Everley, Landon and Sophie never experienced withdrawal. It turns out that instead of morphine, they just need their moms. After seeing this in action in Vancouver, Newman returned to Kingston in 2013 with plans to launch the same approach there, too. Belleville, located an hour’s drive west, followed suit in 2015.
The hope is that by ensuring babies and their mothers get off to a good start, both will continue on a positive path. For mothers, that means pressing on with their addiction recovery and being able—and willing—to keep custody of their babies with little or no need for social services intervention.
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