Our daughter, Maisie, died after ingesting a methadone capsule at a neighbor’s home that was on the ground. Six adults, three of them medical doctors, had been together with her your complete night. Nonetheless, the small white capsule discovered her hand, after which, as a nine-month-old child would do, discovered her mouth. After placing Maisie to mattress throughout her regular routine, her mom MaryBeth discovered her lifeless from an overdose the next morning.
Screams, tears, paramedics, coronary heart breaking cellphone calls, funeral companies, and a police investigation adopted. None of it modified the end result. Maisie died as a result of medicine was not safely saved up and away, out of her sight and attain. Maisie’s loss of life ought to by no means have occurred.
Finally, Maisie’s tragic loss of life was casually labeled to be merely an “unintentional overdose” – with no accountability or motion, solely the traumatic lack of life and grieving mother and father, mates, and household. As her mother and father, now we have unfold her story and legacy to whomever will hear through native information, the entrance web page of USA Right now, podcasts, well being organizations, advocacy teams, and with the federal government at each native and federal ranges with one purpose: We don’t want there to be any extra households with our expertise. We would like modifications in habits, packaging, and practices so no households undergo like ours and there are not any funerals for an pointless sufferer of the opioid epidemic.
Sadly, poisonings of kids, like Maisie, will not be unusual. Roughly 35,000 younger youngsters are dropped at the emergency room every year as a result of they obtained into medicines that had been left inside attain. Fortunately, the overwhelming majority will not be life threatening – however youngsters proceed to seek out substances they need to not have entry to.
What are you able to do to maintain your family members secure? Maintain medicines, nutritional vitamins, and different dietary supplements (together with gummies) “up and away” in a spot the place younger youngsters can’t see or attain them. To assist defend your youngsters or grandchildren:
- preserve all medicines in a child-resistant container with the security cap locked – many different containers, equivalent to capsule bins, will not be and could be simply opened by youngsters.
- preserve medicines up and away and out of sight and attain of younger youngsters, like in a excessive cupboard or on a excessive closet shelf.
- by no means go away unfastened tablets out on a counter or desk – preserve tablets in child-resistant containers till proper earlier than you are taking them.
It’s simple for tablets to fall on the ground and roll out of sight the place younger youngsters might discover them. Take time to comb or vacuum the ground if youngsters can be visiting. If you’re touring, both with younger youngsters or to go to them, you’ll want to pack your medicines in child-resistant containers. When you’re staying in a resort, you may put medicines within the resort room secure or on a excessive shelf within the closet.
Past your each day, you may as well promote unit of use packaging (e.g., blister packs) for medication which can be identified to be deadly in small quantities. Unit of use packaging permits the particular person taking the medicine to solely entry one capsule at a time and helps to maintain medicine out of kids’s attain.
One capsule can kill. Little one-resistant packaging legal guidelines have modified little since 1970, and with the SUPPORT Act of 2018, the U.S. authorities has the authority to make our medicines safer for everybody. We don’t get to boost Maisie, however we’ll all the time be her mother and father, and supporting and selling secure medicine practices is a technique for us to try this.
To study extra about medicine security and secure storage, go to Up and Away Marketing campaign | Remedy Security Program | CDC.
Adam and MaryBeth Gillan reside in Rochester, NY, and are mother and father to 4 youngsters: Rhona, Maisie, Conway, and Archie. Adam works for a big shopper items firm and MaryBeth sits on the board of Camp Stella Maris in Livonia, NY and oversees the Purple Gentle Mission, a fund in Maisie’s reminiscence.
