Every 25 minutes, a baby is born suffering from opioid withdrawal in the United States.
Lily’s Place, an infant recovery center that helps families contending with addictions to opioids, is at the top on the list of places to deal with the problem.
First lady, Melania Trump, recently visited Lily’s Place in Huntington, West Virginia and spoke with Rebecca Crowder, executive director, at length about her special interest in the effect of drugs on children.
“I want to be here to support you and give a voice to Lily’s Place and also for the opioid epidemic,” Mrs. Trump said.
Lily’s Place offers medical care to infants born with Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome, which occurs when newborns have been exposed to addictive substances during a mother’s pregnancy. The center also offers support, education, and counseling services to families and caregivers, through its website.
The need for Lily’s was great. Drug-affected babies were flooding the local hospital’s neonatal therapeutic unit, with three and four babies to a room all suffering with tremors, sneezing, itching and rashes, stomach cramps, diarrhea and light- and sound-sensitivity.
Pediatric neurologist Mitzi Payne, said, “We wanted a calmer place where we could offer a little more attention to these babies along with their moms.”
It came just in time for Rachel Kinder.
For nearly a decade, Kinder’s life had been ruled by heroin. But last year, after repeated attempts, the Milton, West Virginia, native managed to break her addiction via a mix of counseling and methadone, the medication-recovery drug.
Rachel and Dylan
Rachel reconnected with Dylan Hickey, a childhood friend and former addict, and they became a happy couple, looking to a future free of the pain and instability of opioid dependence.
Things got more complicated when Rachael, 27, suddenly found herself pregnant. “I felt so scared,” she said. “I knew I had to stay on the methadone throughout my pregnancy, and no one wants their baby to suffer.”
The couple’s son, Kyrie Hickey, was born just before Christmas in a Huntington hospital. Within three days he was showing signs of neonatal abstinence syndrome (NAS) problems that occur when a baby has been exposed in the womb to opioids.
Withdrawal wouldn’t be easy — not for Kyrie, his parents or the medical staff charged with caring for him.
But this wasn’t really news to anyone. Residents of West Virginia have been hit hard by the opioid epidemic. The state has the highest rate of NAS in the nation, with 33 NAS births per 1,000 babies, according to Dr. Stephen Patrick, a physician and professor of pediatrics at Vanderbilt University.
Lily’s Place
When Kyrie was 6 days old, his parents transferred their baby from the hospital to Lily’s Place, a one-story brown building surrounded by a white picket fence on a quiet street less than a mile away. He was placed in one of the center’s 16 small nurseries, into his own crib in a silent, dimly lit room.
For the next month, he was quietly tended to by the 24-hour nursing staff while Rachael and Dylan learned to care for their baby during and after his opioid withdrawal.
Family education is imperative. “The parents of the babies have limited coping skills, which puts the babies at higher risk.”
Staff members train mothers and fathers to help their babies via therapeutic handling techniques, boosting skills and confidence. The parents learn CPR and basic child-care on top of the specifics of NAS.
Lily’s Place social worker Angela Davis is a lifeline, helping the parents — usually the mothers — with counseling and treatment, housing, food, clothing and baby supplies. The former corrections officer and child protective services worker says that when they do well, “I’m happy for them. When they don’t, it breaks my heart.”
The first lady’s focus on helping addicted mothers and their children is both needed and difficult to bring off.
Arkansas Cares
There does happen to be a model for such a program, Arkansas CARES (Arkansas Center for Addiction research, Education and Services) which was founded as a non-profit division of University of Arkansas for Medical Science (UAMS) Department of Psychiatry.
Cynthia C. Crone, a nurse, helped found it and served as its director until Methodist Family Health took it over from UAMS in January 2006.
The mission of Arkansas Cares is to help substance abusing pregnant women and mothers with children recover from their addictions in a residential setting where they were able to live with their children and begin taking responsibility for raising them.
Crone’s approach was to keep mothers and children together while they go through the process of recovery with the ultimate objective of building healthy families,
In 2002, the American Psychiatric Society gave Arkansas Cares its prestigious Gold Award for its innovative program with the comment that it is the only dual (both mental and substance abuse} diagnosis program of its kind in Arkansas and one of a slowly growing numbers of residential rehabilitation programs nationwide serving both mothers and their children.
Further recognition came in 2004. That year the National Association of Public Hospitals gave Arkansas Cares program its highest award, the Jim Wright award for vulnerable populations.
Cheaper than jail
The cost of housing and treating one mother and two children for four to five months with 12 to 18 months of after care services was about $50,000 compared to four to seven times that amount for the option of putting the mother in jail and her children in foster homes with only health care.
Another plus was that helping pregnant mothers stay clean and sober would result in healthier babies. The medical bills for an underweight premature baby with drugs or alcohol in its system can add up to $150,000 and possibly a lot more.
Alcohol use by pregnant women is the number one cause of mental retardation in America. And it is completely preventable if pregnant women stop drinking.
Women came to the program in many ways—court system, child protective services, health care workers, jail or prison walk-ins or their family may bring them there. Most of the women have been in abusive relationships with men and this along with the other toxic aspects of their lives contributed to their mental problems—post traumatic stress, depression anxiety bi-polar disorder and other—that they suffer along with their addictions.
There is a missing piece to the rebuilding families puzzle and that is getting the fathers of the children involved. We can do a lot better.
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