What Happens in Texas if a Baby Is Born Addicted to Drugs

Tiffany Harper's weekday afternoons are filled with routine.

She picks up her almost iii-year-old son Matthew at daycare after getting off work at 3 p.yard. The toddler, "a ball of energy," plays difficult, running around at home until Harper can convince him to take a breather and cuddle with her on the burrow while watching an episode of his favorite bear witness, PJ Masks.

She makes dinner next, or picks up fast food, enjoying it aslope Matthew at their flat. And then it's bathroom and bedtime past 8 p.g. so the two can get some sleep before doing it all over again.

If the predictability sounds boring to some, Harper is fine with that. The San Antonio native says it's exactly the kind of schedule that eluded her family when she was a child and one she dreamed of while working to get through recovery after a ten-plus year battle with addiction.

"Being a mom is challenging and it's always a learning experience, merely I dearest information technology," she says. "He never stops. Some days are hard, and I want to cry, but the adept days outweigh the bad and the good part is, I get to come across my son happy and growing up."

When Matthew was born in 2018, Harper had recently started a recovery program. Just she'd been using for years earlier that, including through part of her pregnancy, resulting in her newborn testing positive for opioids. Child Protective Services took custody of him and placed him with Harper's sister. Glad he was with family unit, Harper was determined to become him dorsum and followed her treatment program closely, making sure she fulfilled all of the requirements outlined by the court. Fifty-fifty if she did everything perfectly, though, with just a small income from a new job at Luby's, she knew she didn't have plenty money for an flat—a requirement for gaining custody.

That'due south when someone at her treatment program let her know about Casa Mia, a new abode that was opening through a partnership between UT Health San Antonio School of Nursing and the nonprofit Crosspoint Inc. The home was specifically designed for women who had recently had babies and were recovering from opioid addiction and was based on research showing that moms and infants have better long-term outcomes when they're together during a woman's recovery.

Harper figured she had cypher to lose and enrolled as ane of its first residents.

Matthew was six months erstwhile when the two were reunited. "The kickoff night with him was really awesome," she says. "I didn't know anything about being a mom and I was also learning how to be a responsible adult and to stay clean. There were other moms there who helped me and staff who had children and offered pointers. It was like a family there."

•••

With ane-third of all Texas' cases of neonatal forbearance syndrome (NAS), Bexar Canton leads the country in the number of infants born with withdrawal symptoms due to a mother'due south opioid use. Casa Mia has just twenty beds and inside a few months of opening in 2018, it already had a waiting list.

Now, UT Health San Antonio and Crosspoint are on their way to helping improve run across that need every bit they break footing in the coming months on a larger Women's Health Campus that will double the number of beds at Casa Mia and expand the services they can offer to new mothers.

"This is going to have a profound result on the community," says Lisa Cleveland, associate professor at UT Health's School of Nursing who spearheaded the partnership with Crosspoint. "The idea is to stop the cycle of trauma."

The expansion will add an on-site plant nursery for newborns who otherwise would probable have had to spend time in the NICU, also equally private rooms for mom and infant one time the child is discharged, a principal intendance clinic run past the School of Nursing plus programs for behavioral wellness, parenting and more. It will be 1 of only a few centers like information technology in the U.Southward., Cleveland says.

"Typically, babies with NAS go to the ICU and mom gets discharged. For the nearly part, these babies are total-term and they're miserable with no one to hold them," she says. "We say showtime line of direction for these babies is what you do for whatever fussy babe—cuddle, rock, skin-to-skin contact, breastfeed—all the things that moms exercise really well and aren't able to when they're separated."

At the Women ' s Wellness Campus, eligible moms and babies will be able to motility into the specialty nursery subsequently both are stable at the hospital, and the mother gets to act as master caregiver there nether the constant guidance of professionals. "Information technology'due south a much more humane fashion to care for babies, and it'southward a meliorate use of resources," Cleveland says, adding that inquiry shows mothers establish a better bond with their infants and are more motivated to achieving success in recovery when they aren't separated. Infants, as well, benefit from the bonding and stability not always constitute in foster care. Once the babies are released from the nursery, moms and babies have the opportunity to move into one of Casa Mia'due south rooms, where they can stay while the mother participates in a treatment program.

A former NICU nurse who learned of the prevalence of opioid addiction in San Antonio infants while working on her Ph.D. dissertation over a decade agone, Cleveland has long researched and worked to address the event. "It's very traumatic to accept a kid taken abroad," she says. "These babies are motivators to mamas to use themselves to recovery."

Along with her research efforts, by 2017, Cleveland had received grant money from the Texas Health and Human Services Committee to create a countywide collaborative to assess the problem. One of its principal takeaways: At that place was nowhere for women to go to recover from habit while caring for their kid.

Not but was separating children and mothers traumatic for both parties, research showed it was also more expensive for the state.

Cleveland put together a proposal for a program that would help new moms parent while going through treatment and counseling. She qualified for funding, just she didn't take a facility to firm her effort. That's when Colleen Bridger, Ph.D., sometime manager of Metro Health, introduced Cleveland and Kevin Downey, Ph.D., CEO of Crosspoint Inc. The nonprofit that was founded in 1963 operates residential facilities for homeless veterans and those who have been released from behavorial wellness hospitals.

When Downey and Cleveland met, the organization had a small recovery back up home for women who had but completed inpatient habit treatment, just they'd long struggled to fund it. After operating at a loss for years, the board was considering shutting it down at the close of 2018.

Crosspoint Inc. CEO Kevin Downey says it was fate that he and UT Health San Antonio Schoolhouse of Nursing'southward Lisa Cleveland would meet, leading to the partnership that created Casa Mia.

In partnership with Cleveland, they transformed the home into Casa Mia, targeted at new moms recovering from opioid addiction. The School of Nursing worked with Crosspoint'due south existing staff to learn how to care for moms and children and too have provided education for residents in everything from nutrition and parenting to therapeutic gardening.

Moms living at Casa Mia take their own individualized treatment program, many working with Heart for Health Care Services or Alpha Dwelling house. Crosspoint staff enforce strict rules, ensuring they're coming together the requirements of their program, checking in past curfew, maintaining sobriety and participating in Casa Mia programming.

Like Harper did, many of the women also work while living there and learning how to get parents.

"It'due south been an amazing experience," Downey says. "Conspicuously it was fated that Lisa and I would run across."

Cleveland and Downey believe the new heart volition serve as a national model for what can work for moms and infants and as an example for nursing or medical students to be able to see addiction, and barriers to recovery, on a personal level in a way that's simply not available in the classroom. "I think it makes them much better caregivers in the hereafter," Cleveland says.

Once the new facility is consummate, Downey plans to expand from there. Crosspoint already is fundraising to construct additional homes that would firm female person residents from its other programs. "It will take a while, only it's merely been amazing the people who accept stepped up," he says.

The campus is being built on 3 acres purchased from Emmanuel AME Church on the city's East Side. The final slice in their dream, Cleveland says, is to obtain grants to plant a supportive housing programme so those who finish the plan at Casa Mia tin movement into a partially funded flat while working their way up to existence able to pay the full rent on their own place.

The ultimate goal, she and Downey say, isn't simply to restore these women and requite them a new path—though information technology is that—it'due south also to break what they've learned is oftentimes a bike of trauma and addiction in Bexar County. "People oftentimes come across these programs equally serving people right at present, but a program similar this has an intergenerational impact that is hard to overstate," Downey says. "It will make our community stronger and safer for generations to come up."

•••

That'south certainly been the example for Harper.

Harper herself was born with heroin in her system due to her mother'due south drug use. As a kid, she remembers living in a van with her parents before being dropped off one twenty-four hours at an uncle's domicile. He cared for her and her siblings until she was viii, at which indicate her mom returned, still addicted to drugs.

Back with her mom, Harper was experimenting with pot by the time she was 9. Alcohol followed and past fourteen she was using heroin.

"I didn't let information technology go for almost 11 years. It but progressed rapidly. I would go to treatment because it was courtroom ordered but as soon as I would become out, I would go back," she says. "I wasn't fix to stop."

By her 20s, Harper was homeless, crashing on friends' couches, in drug houses or on the street.

Her male parent had died of an overdose after beingness released from prison house when she was a child, and when Harper was a teen, her mom died of an infection in her heart due to hepatitis C contracted through drug employ. "When my mom died, I spiraled down in my addiction," she says. "I think the reason why I stayed in addiction for then long was considering I had no motivation. A part of me e'er wanted to get clean, simply I idea, 'For what? I have no reason to live.' Because of my choices, my family did not trust me, and I isolated myself. I idea I didn't have anyone who loved me and that no 1 would observe I was missing if I overdosed."

Matthew provided that motivation.

Now an employee at Crosspoint'due south transitional home, Harper hopes to eventually transfer to the new facility so she tin be an example to other moms of what's possible. "That's my goal," she says. "I think it's actually of import for them to see that there is promise, regardless of their background. I came from drugs and living on the street."

Recovery, she says, is a day-by-solar day process simply one she'due south been blessed by thus far. "I don't have the desire. Everyone'southward recovery is different, but for me, God lifted that want and I believe information technology's because I had motivation and a purpose in life—and that was to give my son a better life," she says.

Harper remembers as a kid questioning why she wasn't good enough to make her mom desire to give upwardly drugs. She never wants her own son to have reason to inquire that question. So she sticks to her routine: work, playtime, a cartoon and dinner.

"If I can practice it, other women tin definitely practise information technology," she says. "Information technology'southward so beautiful to come across your kids grow upwardly and know that their parent loves them, and they don't have to question that."

harringtonwimen1970.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.sanantoniomag.com/breaking-the-cycle-of-maternal-drug-addiction-in-san-antonio/

Share this post