There are plenty of things a pregnant woman has to worry about as she prepares for her upcoming delivery.
Where will she give birth? Does she want an epidural or should it be natural? What’s her birth plan? Birth song? The list goes on.
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One thing she shouldn’t have to worry about is how her breakfast might affect her ability to keep her newborn baby.
As it turns out, the wrong breakfast can make all the difference.
For one mom, her decision to enjoy a poppy seed bagel before her delivery resulted in a slew of unforeseen consequences, the biggest of which being her son forcibly being taken away from her.
Eizabeth Dominguez are the bagel hours before she went into labor.
According to Cafe Mom , the 29-year-old was asked to take a urine when she arrived at the hospital.
To her shock, the test came back positive for opiates.
“I called my husband freaking out saying, ‘How is this possible?’ I don’t do drugs,” she told WKBW .
When she told her husband, Mark, what she’d eaten that day, he immediately realized what the problem was: her poppy seed bagel.
It may not be common knowledge, but poppy seeds come from opium plants.
According to Britannica , these bagel toppers don’t actually contain opiates themselves, but they can be contaminated with residue during harvesting.
Surprised? Yeah, so was Elizabeth.
So Elizabeth’s bagel had some bad poppy seeds and she failed a drug test moments before she was due to give birth.
It really wasn’t a good situation at all, but it got even worse after the baby, Carter, was born.
As per hospital protocol, the child was taken away from Elizabeth and Child Protective Services (CPS) were called, despite the new mom insisting the doctors retest her.
Both mother and son were tested again for drugs, and while neither tested positive, baby Carter was kept separate from his mom.
For what I can only imagine was an agonizing 24 hours, Elizabeth was forced to be separated from her son while he was monitored, just in case he showed withdrawal symptoms.
Imagine just bringing your baby into the world and then not being allowed to touch him, see him, or even be near him for the first 24 hours – the most precious time a mother spends with her newborn.
“I felt absolutely horrible. I felt like a terrible mother leaving him.”
After the traumatic separation, Elizabeth has been reunited with Carter and has expressed her feelings on her birth experience.
She hopes people take heed of her story and recognize the threat some poppy seed products can pose.
“I just want everyone to know this could happen,” she said. “It’s such a terrible thing and I don’t want it to happen to anyone.”
Reports have since confirmed that it was, in fact, the bagel that made Elizabeth test positive for drugs.
So basically, what everyone should take away from this story is to tread lightly with their bagel choices, particularly if they’re pregnant.
Might as well just stick with good old plain bagels. Are they fancy? No. But I guarantee eating one won’t give you the same problems in the delivery room like Elizabeth had.
So isn’t it kind of worth the switch then?
