(this diary has been edited to remove any specific references to places or persons as requested by court)
Well, it's been awhile since I posted the last diary, introducing my friend Terry and her boys, who have been cruelly separated by Child Protective Services, over a case of absurdly victimizing the mother for the size of her 14-month old toddler, along with other slander and defamation based upon anonymous hearsay deemed unfounded that they threw in to influence the judge to continue the foster custodian arrangement for all three of her children, and wow let me tell you there have been new developments, such that I won't even get into the factual details yet en large, as I promised in the last diary, but instead focus on a more limited perspective at the moment - my friend Terry's toddler and his amazing ability to change his physical size in the span of days and hours, at least according to the hospital.
Yes, we rolled down to the hospital to review medical records of her boy's week-long stay there immediately after being confiscated from his home. Allow me to say, as I'm shaking my head, I can't believe what we saw.
First, Terry always insisted to me they mismeasured her son the first time at the hospital, and that she had remeasured him in length with one nurse and in weight with another, and the results were totally different. Ultimately, after questioning her about it for a bit, I believed her, why would she make it up?
My faith was rewarded. Indeed, after initially measuring him at 73.8cm and 7.5kg, which certainly is concerning if you look at the weight-for-length, it turns out that the boy is actually only 71cm or so, which puts his weight squarely in the normal range when factored relative to length, as is recommended by the CDC for young children if trying to determine under or overweight (and also by the American Academy of Pediatricians in their clinical guidance on the matter).
I should point out that he was 71cm or so a full ten days after he was initially measured at 73.8cm, and then released as healthy, and further than even ten days earlier, as Terry had told me, nurses had recharted his height and weight along these general parameters. Despite this, the controlling doctor in the situation insisted on admitting River after he was confiscated at 73.8cm and 17.5kg, even though the nurses had corrected the mismeasurement and, exercising due diligence, this couldn't have escaped her attention.
Of course, the doctor was in for a rude awakening (to be generous to her) when it turned out the boy was shorter and heavier than he was initially mismeasured at, after being readmitted to the hospital for further "work-up" after being abducted from his loving mother at her orders. Part of the admitting document stated the reasons for his admission was "failure to thrive" and to "document his weight gain" while at the hospital (apparently to prove the theory of FTT).
Strangely though, in the discharge report 7 days later, it is stated that the boy entered the hospital at 7.7kg and exited at 7.99kg, which would seem to support that he easily gained weight at the hospital, but after reviewing all the nurses' notes, which had been held back from us previously, along with actual doctor's notes that suggest against a 7.7kg admission weight, as well as another weight measurement on admission that put the boy's weight at 7.9kg, well, you can decide for yourself what the outlier is as I'll just list all the weights I pulled from the combined reports and notes.
7/1 - 7.9kg
7/1 - 7.7kg
7/3 - 7.92kg
7/4 - 7.92kg
7/5 - 7.99kg
7/7 - 7.86kg
7/8 - 7.99kg
Hmmm...I wonder which one is the outlier there?
So, we have a boy who was originally measured at 73.8cm officially determined to be 71cm not only the same night as the 73.8cm measurement, but ten days later after he'd been stolen from his mother, and we also seem to have evidence that the boy who was 7.5kg according to the first measurement, but 7.7kg with the remeasurement on the same night, got a little heavier by the time the doctor tripped out and decided the only way to finish her "work-up" was to admit the child on an emergency basis to the hospital, and asserting he entered at 7.7kg when every single other weight measurement except for one was greater than 7.9kg.
Indeed, you could ask yourself, how was this child admitted at 7.7kg and two days later 7.9kg, and then not appreciably gain or lose weight? Something tells me that the "Failure To Thrive" recovery rate doesn't usually work out to 100g/day for the first two days, then basically no gain at all, if even that matters because looking at the weights above, it's clear that the 7.7kg is an outlier, and perhaps even a fabrication meant to track closely to the nurse's weight remeasurement ten days earlier.
You may ask yourself why...I'll say don't worry your mind, because it's obvious - lawsuit. They tried every test they could think of to determine the cause of the boy's low weight, all of them came back negative, when in reality all they had to do was look at the most obvious cause, and the one that checks out true by the eyeball test, since he looks well-nourished and was described so by the Triage Nurse when he was initially admitted - the boy is very short for his age and his weight is proportionate to his height in that context.
Just for giggles, here are all the tests they concocted to try to prove their "Failure To Thrive" since he was so underweight for his age, which all came back negative, when the obvious medical observation was that there's no problem with his weight, he's just really short for his age.
THEIR FAILED THEORIES AS TO HIS "FTT"
- anemia
- hemoglobin
- lead poisoning
- HIV
- occult bacterimin and UTI
- thyroid
- genetic abnormality
- B12
- Prealbumin (15 in normal range, they reached and said since low normal "some degree of undernutrition")
The funniest thing of all is that they seemed so desperate to paint this child as somehow lacking in nutrition, after giving up on the "grave" FTT, that they described his score of 15 on Prealbumin, when the normal range is 14-48, as "low normal" and thus "some degree of undernutrition".
It's pathetic to see a respected medical institution act in this fashion, basically under the whip of the CPS and afraid of being sued, ironically likely ensuring they will get sued for an exorbitant sum, and ruin their reputation as one of the finest pediatric facilities in the country.
Oh well.
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(Next diary I promise to spell out all the facts of the abduction)
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Weight-for-age reflects body weight relative to age and is influenced by recent changes in health or nutritional status. It is not used to classify infants, children and adolescents as under or overweight. However, it is important in early infancy for monitoring weight and helping explain changes in weight-for-length and BMI-for-age in older children.
Weight-for-length/stature reflects body weight relative to length and requires no knowledge of age. It is an indicator to classify infants and young children as overweight and underweight.
http://www.cdc.gov/...
Underweight is defined as weight-for-length < 5th percentile based on the CDC gender-specific weight-for-length reference for children less than 2 years of age and Body Mass Index (BMI )-for-age <5th percentile for children 2 to 20 years of age based on the CDC gender-specific BMI-for-age reference (CDC, 2000). BMI is weight in kilograms divided by height in meters squared (kg/m2). Underweight, also referred to as thinness or wasting, is used as an indicator of acute malnutrition and it reflects recent starvation, persistent diarrhea, or both. The WIC Nutrition Risk Criteria (IOM, 1996) defines underweight as <10th percentile weight-for-length or BMI-for-age in accordance with the preventive emphasis of the program. </p>
http://www.cdc.gov/...