Meet heroin's tiniest victims: newborns

rockin'robin

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He was five days old and less than five pounds. He wiggled inside the white blanket that hugged him tight. He stopped moving for a moment and opened his eyes. Then, he wiggled again.

Morphine raced through the newborn's tiny body. He had been given a dose earlier that morning to fight off his opiate cravings and would soon receive more.

Without the drug, nurses told me, the baby's pain would be overwhelming. His body would shake and he would be racked with diarrhea so bad that it could eat at his skin. His loud cries and screams would pierce the halls at Franciscan St. Francis Health in Indiana.

"They feel the pain of the withdrawal so intensely," Neonatal Intensive Care Unit nurse Kelly Butler said. "You can just see how uncomfortable they are. When we wean them sometimes it gets so bad. They can't eat. You can't comfort them. They're just miserable."

That's how life begins for babies born dependent on opiates. Long before their first steps or first words, these infants have experienced a drug withdrawal so powerful it would send most adults to their knees in pain.

As I stood in the hospital room that morning, looking at a child enduring all of this agony during the first days of his life, it struck me that in a world in which so many children are given too little, I had possibly stumbled into the epicenter of unfairness.

I can't adequately describe how beautiful this tiny baby is. On the day I visited him, his parents standing nearby, I fought back tears as I looked at his tousled mess of black hair and at his eyes, their color still hard to make out. His lips were a dark shade of red. His nose was maybe the size of a jelly bean. An orange feeding tube dangled from it.

Medical staffers here said it would take six to eight weeks to wean the child off the drugs that polluted his body in utero. That's an estimate based on far too much experience.

The hospital in recent years, like many others, has seen a flood of babies born dependent on the drugs their mothers passed to them through the use of heroin, pain pills or methadone. An infant care unit that a few years ago saw Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome cases a handful of times a year, now has two or three babies suffering through withdrawal on any given day. Sometimes more.

"Think of this like the spread of the plague or Ebola," Dr. Paul Winchester, who heads the St. Francis NICU, said as we talked in his office. "Nobody had it, and then all of a sudden everybody had it."

The story of heroin and other opiate addictions is playing out all across America.

And at hospitals such as St. Francis, it's taken its cruelest path — torturing infants in the first weeks of their lives.

'Guilty'

The mother of the black-haired newborn, 35, has six children and grew up in rural Johnson County. She seems tortured herself, haunted by the mistakes she has made and by fear for her baby's future. She wanted to talk to me because she hoped her story would help someone else. Her middle name is Nicole, and that's what we'll call her here.

Nicole, with her auburn hair pulled back, nervously twisted in her seat and occasionally wiped away tears as she talked about her fierce addiction to prescription painkillers. I couldn't understand why she had given birth to another child, and she seemed puzzled by that, too, vowing not to have another.

She quietly laughed at herself, almost mockingly, when she told me about her unrealistic, shattered hope that her son would not be born dependent on the methadone she takes.

"I thought that maybe he'd go to a regular nursery, which was so exciting," Nicole said. "But then the withdrawal symptoms set in. He started the shaking. He was jumpy, real jittery, a super high-pitched cry."

Tests would confirm what his behavior indicated: His body craved the opioids he'd grown dependent on in the womb. Before the end of the second day of his life, he'd had his first dose of morphine.

"Guilty," Nicole told me as we talked in a hospital conference room. "That's how I feel."

Painkillers to methadone

Nicole's story is common.

Although the Indiana Department of Health currently has no data on the issue, a study published in April in the New England Journal of Medicine found the rate of NICU admissions for babies suffering from drug dependency nearly quadrupled between 2004 and 2013. They now make up 27 of every 1,000 admissions.

At Eskenazi Health in downtown Indianapolis, officials say the hospital is on track to see a 22% increase this year in the number of newborns experiencing narcotic withdrawal.

For Nicole, addiction stretches back a decade to a painkiller prescription that followed bariatric surgery, the birth of her third child and severe back pains. The pills helped her sleep. They made everything a bit easier. Until they destroyed her.

Before long, she was taking an extra pill at bedtime, and then another. She received more prescriptions, including several after emergency gall bladder surgery, and raced through them. She once devoured a three-month prescription in a week and at one point was downing a dozen pills at a time. But, she said, at least she didn't turn to heroin when the prescriptions ran out, as many others have.

Instead, she spent every dollar she could find on illegally purchased pills, and suffered nasty withdrawals when those ran out.

After years of drug abuse, she finally sought help. And, now, she visits a methadone clinic every day for a legal dose of a chemical opioid that essentially replaces an addicted brain's demand for heroin or prescription drugs such as Vicodin and OxyContin. The methadone treatments have kept her away from prescription painkillers.

But she's still dependent — only now to methadone.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/...heroin-babies-morphine-opiate-drugs/28299459/
 
Read not too long ago...that my City has the most addicted newborns in the State of Florida...so sad!
 
:cry: It's getting bad in my small city , heron use is on the rise here. Druglords are coming in from bigger cities like NY and renting of buying houses and setting up shop. GRRR!
 
One thing that I think would be great..... Try to be proactive and get them on birth control, so they wouldn't have drug addicted babies.... Did you know a significent number of blind multihandicapped babies are that way due to drug abuse? When I say multihandicapped, I mean like the severe multihandicapped types of kids.....they have g-tubes, trachs, are extremely affected mentally etc......
 
i know one who visited a methadane clinic everyday for two yrs or so. BUT I am not sure if this person continues to do that or not. this person does have a tempting issue. Poor this person. oh well
 
just because its on the news, doesn't mean its a new problem, been around for decades, ive actually meet a guy in his 30s who was born from a junkie mum, he's fine....

but still im not convinced, he frequents this bar and associates with Skinheads....(and he's brown!)...
 
The plm with methadone is it just replaces one addiction say thst of junk or oxy with snother even more addicting methadone. Which ewts your teath and eats your bones, among other things.
So great
She doesnt use ixy no more..
Yeahhhh
But she needs her methadone orbshe will get even more.sick withdrals then oxy ever can give you.
Methadone is real evil stuff. Used to sell for a bufk a mil, who knows now.
It was created by the nazi due to the morthine shirtsge in ww2. And was nwmed adolfaline after adolf hitLer after the war they chwnged the name for marketing purposes.
I hsve never been on the methadone progrsme or the juice as its called.
But ive used it when i hwd too.
My question is this
So she no longer used pewscription pills...cool
But shes on proscriprion meth....
I ask
Is there much difference?
Im not asking chemicaly.....
Give it some Thought.
 
My brother was a long time heroin addict and dealer...got 5 years in Huntsville...when he first went to jail...he was a sick puppy, white as cotton....feel he did get some "help" weening him off the drug tho'...could be methodone....Doesn't touch drugs anymore tho'....but as expected, became an alcoholic, it's genetic in my family...

It's hard (for me) to have, even give...any sympathy to a woman who is a druggie, getting pregnant and still using.....If she was raped, that's different, and feel a lot of them are...or prostitute themselves to get the drug.
 
My brother was a long time heroin addict and dealer...got 5 years in Huntsville...when he first went to jail...he was a sick puppy, white as cotton....feel he did get some "help" weening him off the drug tho'...could be methodone....Doesn't touch drugs anymore tho'....but as expected, became an alcoholic, it's genetic in my family...

It's hard (for me) to have, even give...any sympathy to a woman who is a druggie, getting pregnant and still using.....If she was raped, that's different, and feel a lot of them are...or prostitute themselves to get the drug.

Thats the idea behind methadone. Anyway...as an idea. For harm control. So you have junkies. They get on the juice, which is more addicting then junk, but peovided at a vwry cheap cost. So the idea is since they sre getting theirbfix re methadone, they then wont be using junk, as methadone tends to csncek junk out.
The plm is and its a very serious and ramoant plm is methadone mskes it very very easy to become cross Addicted, usually with crack, as the methadone eases the hsrd cravings that come with binging on.crack...i hwve known multiplw jubkies who never touched crack end up due to methadone being addicted to Both.
Because
Methadone only addresses the chemical nature od addiction. It adreses the withdrawl from junk, which i know very very well. Thats it.
It also gives the junkie a means to esrn more.for other deugs. As its easy to play the system, and get csrries, and sell it or trade it on the street. You csn shoot methdone and for the longest time the docs and chenist of big phsrma said methadone csnt be injected
Of course they were wrong.
So the idea is the junkie wont be robbing the gas station for junk since methadone controls the sickness. And your supposed to be whinned off..but ive kbown junkies on the hice for Decades.....
Addiction is a chemical plm for some drugs like heroine. But addiction is way way way morethen at bottom just a chemical plm. Thus methadone. In my experience, and i know what im signing about only just gets the junkie addicting to another pharmeceutical....
Yeahhhhh
 
worked with several students in my teaching career who were born addicted to drugs. They have struggles with learning, staying attention, impulse control and many more. Some end up fine and others end up with those struggles forever and get into drugs themselves.
 
been happening for many years even as far back as king Charles1 his wife Henrietta who addicted to opium queen Victoria to cannabis and odd opium shot..It not the province of desperate venial girls in the gutter..it social problem first as to why find out reason hopefully end it.. father was probably addict so his sperm be affected...I think it awful see young girls in America cuffed to bed and made have C section then arrested for their own good..To my knowledge don't happen anywhere else and that not way to cure it
 
worked with several students in my teaching career who were born addicted to drugs. They have struggles with learning, staying attention, impulse control and many more. Some end up fine and others end up with those struggles forever and get into drugs themselves.

Are these "grey area"/ "mild" kids? I know you work with dhh kids. Yeah, even the mild/grey area kids who were born addicted can be really tough to handle. Not as bad as the blind multi kids who are the product of drug abuse....those kids are REALLY capital A, Affected. Still..... imagine if their mothers could have gotten into residential treatment.... they wouldn't be so badly off.
 
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