Babies being swapped at the hospital

Ayahuasca said:
Just LOL if you think a beard trim gives you that type of jaw.
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you got a beard line? I see loads of people walking around with a beard that tries to make it look like they have a different shaped jaw, usually the beard is shaved above the actual jaw line
 
arknor said:
you got a beard line? I see loads of people walking around with a beard that tries to make it look like they have a different shaped jaw, usually the beard is shaved above the actual jaw line
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Yes, plenty of people do that jockstrap shave but it looks nowhere near the same if they don’t have an actual jawline. Keep coping my G.
 
arknor said:
beard lines you mean.

don't babies usually have a wrist band that the mother gets to keep when they leave the hospital, usually kept as a souvenir
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certainly these days and in the UK, but I think in some countries it is/was the habit that they'd say take the baby and immediately weigh it or potentially put it in a shared creche for a while whilst it and the mother where checked over separately hence a chance for a mistake.
If you watch some of the older and foreign films you'll sometimes see it as just one of those things that happens/happened.

It's one of those cases where you realises there is often a very good historical reason for how certain things are done, and when you look into it you find out how and why:) and then you realise that pretty much every stupid "health and safety" rule, or "procedure document" that seems overly long and complicated at work will be there because at some point someone has messed up, and how seemingly stupid yet strictly enforced something is can give you a very good idea as to exactly how bad whatever happened was.
You see a notice about "keeping hands clear" of a bit of machinery and it's normal, you see an active guard that prevents your hands getting near it and you know someone ignored it and got hurt, you see an active guard that requires you to for example use both hands to press widely separated "on" buttons for the machine and you realise that someone still managed to hurt themselves so they've set it up to really require some effort to get a hand in the way.
A good example in hospitals is when they'll write in marker "this hip" or something prior to an operation ;) (so a surgeon in a hurry doesn't confuse you needing a replacement left hip with the next patient who needs a right hip) or they'll check your name, check your wrist band and then check the computer before giving you meds (when I took my dad in the other day he had a barcoded tag and they were checking the bed, his name, and the barcode then scanning the barcode on every medication having checked their records of what was on were right with him).
 
Werewolf said:
It's one of those cases where you realises there is often a very good historical reason for how certain things are done, and when you look into it you find out how and why:) and then you realise that pretty much every stupid "health and safety" rule, or "procedure document" that seems overly long and complicated at work will be there because at some point someone has messed up, and how seemingly stupid yet strictly enforced something is can give you a very good idea as to exactly how bad whatever happened was.
You see a notice about "keeping hands clear" of a bit of machinery and it's normal, you see an active guard that prevents your hands getting near it and you know someone ignored it and got hurt, you see an active guard that requires you to for example use both hands to press widely separated "on" buttons for the machine and you realise that someone still managed to hurt themselves.
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Sadly something a lot of people don't seem to really comprehend. I used to audit health and safety at work and it would do my head in how complacent people were and seemingly unable to note and understand simple things like why areas around automatic fire doors/shutters were marked out in hazard stripes plus notices about not blocking them but people would still leave things in the way.
 
Rroff said:
Sadly something a lot of people don't seem to really comprehend. I used to audit health and safety at work and it would do my head in how complacent people were and seemingly unable to note and understand simple things like why areas around automatic fire doors/shutters were marked out in hazard stripes plus notices about not blocking them but people would still leave things in the way.
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My brother in law works for a firm that has had a "few" nasty accidents, generally down to lack of training for staff on very dangerous equipment, and the equipment being poorly maintained*.

Apparently they had a fire alarm go of a while back during the night shift, and several things got the backs up of the fire service (rightly so from what I've been told), so they did an impromptu walkaround and were extremely unimpressed with the fact that one of the firedoors had been chained shut on the other side of the site...apparently the day staff in the other building had chained it shut when they shut down for a long weekend and hadn't bothered to tell anyone/unchain it when they returned to work.
I've said it before on here, but it's also the basic reason my dad left one of the best paying jobs he ever had, despite being in the middle of taking a night course to get himself into an even better one there, the management kept putting barrels of flammable chemicals in the way of the emergency exit. The last straw was the day they had a fire and my dad and a co-worker had to shift them to get out - this was well before the current era of H&S and the ability to easily report things confidentially.


*Although by all accounts it has a full set of very impressive emergency stop systems now, unfortunately they're not where they're needed if they're down to one man operating it due to the position of where the operator needs to be and where they put things like the "laser break" stop so it doesn't trip during routine use...At the rate they're going I'm half expecting them to get shut down.
 
Our first had the tag, but she was taken away when they do the test I think to make sure she's aware / responsive, can't remember what it was they do. She never came back with a tag, she was small and it fell off as far as I remember. She has lighter hair, both parents have dark hair and our youngest (1yo) has dark hair. I don't think she isn't ours but should it ever be revealed she wasn't, I don't think I could easily just give her up. She's 6 now and the time we've had together is too strong a bond to break.
 
Werewolf said:
A good example in hospitals is when they'll write in marker "this hip" or something prior to an operation
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Yeah they tend to ask a few times too, various people check your DOB etc.. you'd think these procedures would be idiot-proof and yet... Automation ought to help with some of it, prescribing errors are still a big issue - can be things like bad handwriting or just people not paying attention + hospital pharmacies can be slow AF... take the human out of various parts of the process and you can get things running much more efficiently. (for example: https://pharmaceutical-journal.com/...-medication-errors-halved-by-automated-system)

Spacedeck said:
I don't think she isn't ours but should it ever be revealed she wasn't, I don't think I could easily just give her up. She's 6 now and the time we've had together is too strong a bond to break.
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Seems to be a similar case with this woman on reddit, like she's posted in the legal help section and also made some comments along the lines of getting a big house for both families... The thing is the other family might just want their daughter back and kinda stay in touch. Another aspect is if she decides to keep it quiet would she be liable if/when the other family discovers the error... Like supposing she keeps it and the other family find out when the kids are 15 say, they go to the hospital and they contact this mother... if this mother reveals that she already knows and has known for 10 years then WTF - the other family could be miffed that they could have been alerted 10 years ago and that this woman has essentially decided to keep their child from them for another decade.
 
Chris Wilson said:
"Labels" tied to appendages? Is that the best we can do? Just microchip them at birth, before the umbilical is severed, and do an enforced DNA on baby and both parents, the parents pay for all this. Jeez, my dogs are better documented...
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Enforcing a DNA test on a baby at birth wont happen as you can figure out why as it will expose the amount of men raising kids that are not biologically theirs as I've not looked it up for a while but remember seeing some shocking numbers and thats the people who took a test. Numbers would be shocking if it was mandatory.

This is partly why animals seem better documented than humans.
 
I was worried about that when our daughter was born. Didn't need to worry, from the time of birth to us going home, she was always with either my wife or myself.
 
peterwalkley said:
That was our experience when both my girls were born (C-sections). A nurse was tagging their wrists whilst the initial bonding cuddle with mum was happening - so about 10 seconds from coming out ! The maternity unit was entry secured and the staff did emphasise several times that nobody should be taking the baby out of the parents sight.

There does seem to be a "thing" in other countries where mum and baby get separated routinely (as opposed to only when intensive care in an incubator is needed) and I guess if they're not tagged or there's someone maliciously swapping them when out of parental sight then I could see it happening.

I think there's more TV/soap/film dramas using it as a plot line than real incidents ....
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I'd guess these are one of those things that we've learned from and put better measures and safeguards in place to ensure it never happens again.

Must be a pretty horrific thing to go through, whether it's 30 days after birth or 30 years after birth. I don't think the latter would be any easier to cope with, as you'd always be wondering where your biological child ended up.
 
I had a full knee replacement in February and every time a Clinician walked in my room they would be checking my wristband before they did anything even though they saw me all day every day.
It's because of mistakes made in the past that I have my job in Clinical Negligence.
Some older members may remember the days before PreAMS where you would just be told to turn up for an operation but now you have to go through PreAMS for a couple of hours being asked and tested for everything.
 
Semple said:
Must be a pretty horrific thing to go through, whether it's 30 days after birth or 30 years after birth. I don't think the latter would be any easier to cope with, as you'd always be wondering where your biological child ended up.
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It hasn't happened for decades in this country, too many safeguards.
 
I was listening to Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast “Revisionist History” the other day and came across this amazing story of a baby swap:

Two sets of twins born a day apart in Colombia.

One pair born in the lively capital city of Bogotá, the other born 110 miles to the north in the most rural area with no running water, no flush toilets, no nothing.

One of the little boys up north was very sick, so at day one or two, his grand mother brought him to the better hospital in Bogotá, where he was switched with one of the twins in the other pair. So this is an extraordinary double-switch case.

So you had two sets of boys who were identical twins to somebody else growing up together thinking they were fraternal twins.

The boys up in the north, moved down to Bogotá to make a living. They became butchers in a local supermarket. Actually, Bogotá's a big city. It wasn't so local. But a friend of one of the other guys who was raised there, went into the butcher shop, and she thought, "Jorge, what are you doing here?" And he said, "My name is William." And she could hardly believe it. So she took a picture of William, showed it to her friend, Jorge and Jorge of course is a twin, right? He thinks he's a twin to this guy, Carlos. And anyway, they sat on it for awhile, but then Jorge went online and he saw himself in clothes he knew he didn't own. And he saw someone next to this guy who looked just like his twin brother, only it wasn't his twin brother.

And they met, they got together. And of course they were all in shock. Particularly because the one guy who was raised in the city knew that if things had gone right, he would've been raised in a very rural area. And he's someone who enjoyed the city. And the guy up in the north who should have been raised in Bogotá, was desperate for education, wanted to learn and had no opportunities, never went past the fifth grade.

So there were some tensions in the beginning. But actually, I will say that these four boys are the most gracious and loving of any of the switched at birth families I've encountered. They call themselves a group of four. They make decisions together. And any differences they had, I mean, it was not their fault. These things just happen sometimes. They get along beautifully now,all four, all combinations of twins.
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https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/revisionist-history/the-magic-wand-experiment

:eek:
 
It may all be apocryphal, but the story in my Mum's family about her birth in the 50s is that when her father was first presented with his first born child (after she was presumably taken away, checked and cleaned up), he immediately declared "This isn't my daughter!", triggering some frantic scurrying of midwives, who eventually determined that they had indeed presented the wrong baby, and my mum was duly found and handed over.

She's done enough genealogy to demonstrate that he was right, assuming the story is true!
 
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King4aDay said:
It may all be apocryphal, but the story in my Mum's family about her birth in the 50s is that when her father was first presented with his first born child (after she was presumably taken away, checked and cleaned up), he immediately declared "This isn't my daughter!", triggering some frantic scurrying of midwives, who eventually determined that they had indeed presented the wrong baby, and my mum was duly found and handed over.

She's done enough genealogy to demonstrate that he was right, assuming the story is true!
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I can believe it.
I was a 50s baby and when my Mum was alive I asked her about my birth at Haywood Hospital near Burslem, Stoke.
She said there was nothing to identify me and all the Mums were just expected to know their baby in a room full of babies.
I'm pretty sure it was a common mistake but virtually always picked up by the parents.
 
The moment anyone declares it's impossible then you know it'll probably happen.

My Mrs went in for a gall bladder removal and got the wrong wristband.. the Nurses were just yapping and went through the motions, asked the Mrs something, she was in pain and delirious, it was only when the pain killers kicked in did she notice..
 
Demon said:
The moment anyone declares it's impossible then you know it'll probably happen.

My Mrs went in for a gall bladder removal and got the wrong wristband.. the Nurses were just yapping and went through the motions, asked the Mrs something, she was in pain and delirious, it was only when the pain killers kicked in did she notice..
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I hope you did something about it.
 
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