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"As heroin tightens its grip on Wisconsin, more attention is being paid to its youngest victims -- babies born exposed to that drug and other opiates.One Milwaukee-area hospital is changing its ways because of the surge, which one mother knows all too well.\"Do I ever blame myself? Oh, God, yeah. All the time. I still have guilt,\" said a Milwaukee woman speaking anonymously about what happened because she used heroin. She tried to quit, but it was difficult.\"You feel like you're going to die if you don't get it,\" she said.Wanting to get clean, she turned to methadone, a prescription drug that helps addicts withdraw. But while on methadone, she became pregnant.\"I just felt really guilty and I was worried,\" she said.Her son spent his first weeks of life going through withdrawal.\"He was crying and crying,\" she said. \"He had to have a feeding tube. He couldn't drink from a bottle. His body was so tensed up and he could barely bend his arms.\"He was in intensive care for three weeks at a Milwaukee-area hospital, followed by three weeks of withdrawal medication at home and two months of physical therapy.His story is becoming more and more familiar at hospitals around the state, including Waukesha Memorial.\"We're seeing more and more babies coming in withdrawing from opiates,\" said neonatal nurse practitioner Sharon Nelson.The opiates or opioids include heroin, methadone, or prescription painkillers like Vicodin and OxyContin.\"Sometimes 25 percent of our neonatal intensive care census will be these babies, four or five at a time,\" Nelson said.\u00A0The babies go through physical withdrawal.\"Sometimes when they're sleeping they'll be tremoring,\" Nelson said. \"They can have seizures, fever, increased respiratory rate, extreme irritability. They don't sleep well.\"Waukesha Memorial Hospital is getting up to 40 of these babies a year. It's prompted the birthing center there to develop a new protocol to train staff on what to look for and how to intervene early when an addicted woman learns she's pregnant.\"We don't want to alienate them,\" said Barb Olstad, clinical manager of Waukesha Memorial's Birthing Center. \"We want them to know we're not here to take their babies away. We're here to try to help them as best we can.\"Waukesha County is not alone. Statewide, the number of babies born exposed to addictive illegal or prescription drugs -- those diagnosed with Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome (NAS) -- has jumped 38 percent from 2008 to 2012. According to the state Department of Health Services, 588 babies were diagnosed with NAS in 2012.\"It's heart-wrenching,\" said Marian Ballos of Ozaukee County's Division of Child Protective Services. \"Imagine the hospital bill. That baby is in a hospital in a NIC unit anywhere from three weeks to two months -- imagine that cost to taxpayers.\"Roughly $3,500 a day is the national average -- costing taxpayers because some of these families have no insurance, so Badgercare or Medicaid steps in.The baby born to the woman WISN 12 News spoke with is now 2 years old.\"We really don't know long-term what methadone may have done, which is scary,\" she said. \"But so far, he seems OK.\"He seems OK. She lives with the guilt every day.\"I just feel like we should have been more responsible,\" she said. \"He should not have had to go through that.\"Because the problem is relatively new, experts said there are no studies yet to see what the long-term effects on the children might be.While it may seem similar to the cocaine baby scare of the 1990s, Nelson said for those babies, the danger centered on toxic effects during the pregnancy. There was no withdrawal for the babies from cocaine. But with opiates, there is an addictive or withdrawal component. So it's a whole new set of concerns.For more information, go to\u00A0http://www.perinatalweb.org/assets/cms/uploads/files/Methadone_Guide%20for%20Parents_2013_v4.pdf\u00A0"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.wisn.com/article/wisconsin-babies-face-new-epidemic/6321189>