When you become a parent, you suddenly start to find dangers in even the most unexpected places, but one mum has issued an important message this week: accidents can always happen.
Stevie Niki, blogger at My Tribe of Six, is a mum-of-four. In one of her latest blog posts, she recounted how her three-year-old daughter got her little hands on medication and wound up overdosing.
In the post, titled ‘Today she overdosed, and tonight I’m hugging her tight’, Stevie describes how her older daughter takes daily meds. Her younger daughter, the ‘threenager’, ‘always tries to take them’ and is subsequently told NEVER to touch them.
Still, she says, it happened – because accidents happen. This is something that Stevie reiterates for the people who will inevitably read her post and pose the question, ‘Where were you?’.
“I want to share it, because sometimes we all need reminding that we cannot become complacent as parents,” she explained, setting the scene.
On that day, family members had come over to visit. Stevie’s ‘threenager’ was playing in her room with her cousin, and the mum thought nothing of venturing outside and leaving her tot inside, in her ‘totally safe and kid-proof’ home.
“Well, how wrong I was, and let this serve as a reminder to NEVER underestimate the determination of a threenager,” she wrote.
Stevie’s suspicions were immediately raised when she walked back inside the house and found her dining room chairs, which had been stacked in her kitchen, moved over to the other side of the room.
When she found an empty medication container on the floor, she knew exactly what had happened. Her three-year-old had finally plucked up the determination to make a burst for the medication she had always been warned off.
And she had reached the medicine cupboard, despite the fact that it is set higher than Stevie’s own head – indeed, she finds it difficult to reach at times, herself.
She proceeded to ask her daughter where the medication was, and was told, ‘They’re all in my tummy, Mummy’. Stevie was able to determine that her daughter had consumed ’20 to 30 capsules and six Strepsils’.
As you can imagine, the family headed straight off to the emergency room: “Riddled with guilt and total shame, I said to the triage nurse, ‘My daughter just overdosed on prescription medication’, a phrase I thought I would never say, and would be happy to never repeat again in my life.
“A quick call to the poisons line, a chat with the nurse, a quiet giggle after I told her how she managed to get hold of the medication, and a bit of a wait for the doctor; and we were then home and well.”
Thankfully, the tot didn’t suffer any major side-effect. The medication she took was slow-release Melatonin, which is the artificial version of a naturally-occurring hormone in the brain that helps us to relax.
Stevie is also breathing a sigh of relief over the fact that her daughter didn’t touch an array of other tablets that would have been ‘potentially deadly’, had she overdosed on them.
Stevie is not sharing her story for judgement; rather, she wants to share this story to remind parents everywhere of some very important lessons.
“You can never be too vigilant when it comes to your children, but also remember, accidents happen to all of us – even the most cautious of us,” she wrote, urging others not to be ‘so quick to judge’.
We are so relieved to hear that Stevie’s daughter is OK after that ordeal. She is so right – children are very clever and so resourceful when feeling determined. We all need to be super-vigilant but also remember that accidents can arise from ‘nothing’.
