Has anyone ever had a baby that was on a methadone program?

Waitin on baby #4
#1. September 18th, 2009, at 8:04 AM.

I have PERSONALLY never gone through it. A close friend just did. She said it was hard on them both but worth it. I don’t know exact details but I do know that she said it took about 2 months to start feeling OK. Hope this helps some. Good luck

Heather
#2. September 19th, 2009, at 12:05 PM.

I haven’t but i found the following online… I had to look when i seen the posting!

Many babies have been born to mothers using methadone, and large studies have shown that methadone does not damage the unborn child. But the baby may experience withdrawals, which may not start immediately after the birth.

The baby can be detoxed in a few days – under medical supervision – without any long-lasting effects. If the baby is withdrawing, make sure the doctors know. Allow the baby to rest as peacefully as possible between regular feeds and avoid bright lights, which may irritate him/her.

You must not try and detox the baby yourself, or ever give methadone to a child – you could easily kill it!

ob RN MA
#3. September 20th, 2009, at 7:10 AM.

I’ll be frank with you so that you have an honest understanding of the experience, but please don’t take anything personally, because I’m not trying to scare you. I applaud that you are asking ahead of time and not taking it lightly, because many people do take it very lightly and it’s offensive to the nurses who care for their children, sometimes up to 2-3 months in our nursery, and even longer in the NICU.

The withdrawal is dependent on how much methadone a person is on….obviously the more methadone, the harder the withdrawal for the infant.It can take a week, it can take months. I’m sure you know that drug use can result in premature birth, and for our purposes, methadone is a drug, and if a baby is premature, that could affect the withdrawal, too.

We routinely assess the babies for their withdrawal symtoms. We are looking for how well they eat, how much the vomit, if they have tremors or seizures, how long they stay asleep in between feedings, and what their cry sounds like…is it a piercing cry or a normal cry? They get scored on a scale and then the score is totalled. You want the scores to be lower each day…often they are not, and the score is what determines when a baby gets to go home. A higher score may mean long term hospitalization or even intensive care unit hospitalization (especially with seizures).

In order to treat the symptoms and help with the withdrawal, the babies are given a solution called DDTO, which is an opiate, just like heroin. This solution makes the symptoms less intense, just like a drug abuser using their drug of choice…but instead of increasing the amount of drug, like a user would, we have to decrease the drug to help withdraw the baby.

THis often results in a great deal of discomfort for the baby. They often have very acidic stools that cause terrible excoriation on their bottoms, and the scream for the better part of the day when they’re awake, often. I have to say honestly that its terrible to watch. It’s hard for the nurses to watch. The babies long for attention and crave soothing. We need to keep their cribs away from stimulation, and sometimes cover them to keep the light low….often we place simple black and white drawings to let them focus on so that they can learn to entertain themselves.

As a parent, what you can do to help the situation is to visit your baby often. Come and feed him, bathe him, and change his diaper. The separation a baby experiences while in a nursery can be developmentally harmful, so if you minimize that separation, your baby will be in a better situation.

One other note, often we find that addictive personalities tend to try and make the nurses turn against each other. They find a particular nurse that they like, and they will bad mouth other nurses to that person. It’s a destructive behavior and doesn’t make you look like a better parent, which is why we think people do this….It is frustrating because the nursery nurses are all there because they geniunely care for those babies.

Good luck!