Pregnant woman goes into labor but doctor informs her she tested positive for meth

Maggie Downs, a writer from Palm Springs, California, shared her experience of almost losing her newborn baby after discovering that a drug was in her body.

Downs, who was 42 weeks pregnant when she tested positive for methamphetamine, although she had never used the medication in her life. But several hours after the delivery of her first child, a nurse told her the devastating news in the hospital bathroom.

Surprised, Downs took the news as a joke believing that she could never test positive for the drug. "Well, I've always been a positive person," she told the nurse, according to an All That News report. She thought it was a big mistake in part of the hospital.

When the nurse asked her to urinate in a cup to be tested for the medication, he did so without any doubt.

Downs at first laughed, knowing that he had never used the drug for what must have been some mistake. The nurse, however, warned her of the seriousness of the situation, because Downs was at risk of losing her baby if a social worker determined that she was taking drugs.

She knew that the only medication she had consumed during pregnancy was prenatal vitamins and an asthma inhaler. Follow us on Twitter to learn more

But, when the result came out positive, she was completely surprised. Going through the pain of the contractions, the nurse told Downs that she could not breastfeed her son.

Even her husband insisted on the impossibility of finding the drug in his wife's body, wondering if there was an error.

Downs also recalled all the diet she had taken during her pregnancy to calm down if she had made a mistake in a part of her.

"Without alcohol, without raw food, most of my diet was organic, my drinking water was purified through a reverse osmosis system," she explained.

Even when she suffered from a toothache, she used clove oil instead of visiting a doctor, since she didn’t want the anesthesia to enter her body and move to the placenta.

The inhaler was the one to blame

Finally, it was deduced that the Downs inhaler was the main culprit behind the incident. As it turns out, medication for asthma is one of the few chemicals that can give positive to methamphetamine in your body.

Tragically, the hospital is responsible for reporting such an incident to Child Protective Services, which have warned Downs that they could possibly take their baby.

The following days became a real nightmare. It took more than three weeks after the birth of her son to convince hospital staff that this was the case and that she was fully capable of caring for her baby.

She had never used drugs, and because of a mistake like this, she was about to lose her beloved newborn. Fortunately, the situation did not get worse and the hospital was able to solve the problem and allow Downs to take her baby.

While people are happy that these standard rules are followed when they are really necessary, rare cases like this worry us because it’s about separating mothers from their babies.

It is even more terrifying knowing that they are completely innocent.