Monday, August 30, 2010

medical records

Ryan and I got a call on Thursday from our adoption agent. She had some good news. Kelly was finally moving out of Amanda's house. She'd had enough. Not only had Amanda shut off the house phone (so Kelly couldn't use it) but she and her daughter were beginning to taunt Kelly and Sophie with food - bringing home McDonald's and eating it in front of them - telling them to "go ask Ryan and Ashley for money if you wanna eat."

I don't know how you look at a 3 year-old and tell her "I'm not going to help you" but I haven't pretended to understand how these people think - I'm not going to start now.  

According to Mary, sometimes they would feed Sophie, but not Kelly. And it usually depended on whether Tony was "happy" - that's when Kelly would get treated well (further evidence of the sick relationship between Amanda and Tony - that they decided whether to help or torture Kelly on any given day.) But Kelly hit her breaking point when Amanda told her she could no longer use her phone to talk about her adoption plans. She didn't want Kelly "conducting that kind of business" on her phone.  Kelly finally realized that Amanda didn't care about her, she didn't care about Sophie, and she didn't care about the health of this baby. The same woman who drove all night from Georgia because she was SO CONCERNED about her safety was now turning her back and treating her like garbage.  My guess is that Tony was disappointed that we were no longer financially supporting all of them. The burden of guilt was falling on him again and he couldn't take it. Kelly tried to explain that she ASKED us not to help her, "it's not their responsibility" but clearly they didn't care. 

Mary was going to make all of the arrangements so Tony and Amanda wouldn't find out where she was going (and disrupt Kelly's chance to move on, again). Mary was also retaining a lawyer for us in Georgia and helping Kelly re-apply for Medicaid and food stamps. The other good news was that Mary had the medical records analyzed from the night Kelly went to the emergency room and we have an updated estimated due date - October 12th!  Kelly also passed every drug test, blood test and urinalysis without any problems. Her heart rate was fine, her blood pressure was fine, and she was only in the emergency room for 3 hours - which told us that the baby was fine too or they would not have let her go so fast. They didn't do a sonogram, but they gave her a prescription for Iron and a daily vitamin without any restrictions to her activity or diet. 

Our only freak-out moment happened when Ryan forwarded the medical records to me and I finally had a chance to pour over them. I looked at every number and abbreviation, trying to figure out what it all meant. First thing I noticed, under "Current Medications" the nurse listed "mj. occ. pain pill" The nurse also wrote "admits to mj use", so it was definitely something they talked about. The urinalysis came back "negative" for every drug, but listed "Presumptive Positive" under the THC results. She'd been smoking pot and admitted it to the nurse, but not so much that it came back in her test results. 

I google searched, "effects of marijuana on a fetus". The first link I clicked on was blocked by Hallmark. Great. Now I'm on some kind of list. The second link was through drugpolicy.org and it said "there is no convincing scientific evidence that marijuana causes psychological damage or mental illness in either teenagers or adults. Some marijuana users experience psychological distress following marijuana ingestion, which may include feelings of panic (hello...trip to the emergency room?), anxiety, and paranoia (as in...every single text message we've ever gotten from Kelly). Such experiences can be frightening, but the effects are temporary.  


Since it was not directly linked to a conversation about THC and babies, I clicked on a yahoo user question that made my heart sink. Chrishawn T asked, "I have been smoking marajuana basically throughout my whole pregnancy, and I know its not right, but how has it effected my baby if at all?"  

And this person gets to have babies. 

Awesome.

The answer was, "When adverse outcomes are found, they are inconsistent from one study to another, always relatively minor, and appear to have no impact on infant health or mortality. For example, in one recent study, researchers reported a statistically significant effect of marijuana on birth length. The marijuana-exposed babies, on average, were less than two-tenths of one inch shorter than babies not exposed to marijuana. Another study found a negative effect of marijuana on birth weight, but only for white women in the sample. In a third study, marijuana exposure had no effect on birth weight, but a small negative effect on gestational age. Overall, this research indicates no adverse effect of prenatal marijuana exposure on the physical health of newborns."

So according to this, my baby will be two-tenths of one inch shorter than the other babies with a potentially low birth weight, but that's about it.  Certainly nothing to cancel the adoption about, but worth calling Mary back and telling her, "Ummm...Kelly totally lied to us!"  And maybe let's do a better job of telling the truth in the future? Mmmm-Kay?


Cool.


And seriously...if she's gonna smoke pot, why is she smoking the kind that makes her all crazy and irrational?  Why can't she smoke the kind that makes her want to take her prenatal vitamin and get a sonogram? 

2 comments:

raegann said...

your baby is definitely gonna be born on your anniversary. I'm calling it now. (and if i'm wrong, who cares, you still get a baby)!

Anonymous said...

As a 31-year old daughter of a mom who smoked occasionally for about 5 of the 9 months I'm perfectly healthy, nothing abnormal...