Healthy 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 a surprising discovery of a drug in her body.

Downs, who was 42-weeks-pregnant when she was tested positive for methamphetamine, stated that she never used the drug in her life.

But several hours into labor with her first child, a nurse told her the surprising news in the hospital bathroom.

Shocked, Downs took the news as a joke believing that she could never be tested positive for the drug. ‘Well, I’ve always been a positive person,’ she told the nurse, as per her report published on Narratively.

She thought that it was a huge mistake on part of the hospital. When the nurse asked her to urinate in a cup so that she could be tested for the drug, she did so without any hesitation. But when the result came out positive, she was completely shocked.

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Going through the pains of contractions, Downs was told by the nurse that she would not be able to breastfeed her child.

Even her husband insisted on the impossibility of the drug being found in his wife’s body. He argued if there was some mistake. Downs also recounted all the diet she had taken during her pregnancy to reassure herself if there had been some mistake on part of her.

‘No alcohol, no deli foods, nothing raw, undercooked or smoked. The bulk of my produce was organic, my drinking water purified through a reverse-osmosis system,’ she wrote in her article.

Even when she suffered from a toothache, she used clove oil rather than visit a doctor as she did not want anesthetic to enter her body and pass on to the placenta.

She further informed that prenatal vitamins and puffs from her prescribed asthma inhaler were the hardest drugs that entered her body.

Finally, it was deduced that Down’s inhaler was the major culprit in the incident. She informed that methamphetamine is available in two forms, ‘d’ and ‘1.’

While the ’d' form is a stimulant and appetite suppressant available only on prescription, the ‘1’ form is contained over-the-counter as an active ingredient of Vick’s inhaler.

Tragically, the hospital is liable to report such an incident to the Child Protective Services, who have warned Downs that they can possibly come and take away her baby.

Fortunately, the situation did not worsen to that, and the hospital was able to solve the issue and allow Downs to have her baby.