“They had a singular piece of evidence that I had taken something, and it was wrong.”

Susan Horton had been a stay-at-home mom for almost 20 years, and now—pregnant with her fifth child—she felt a hard-won confidence in herself as a mother.

Then she ate a salad from Costco.

Horton didn’t realize that she would be drug-tested before her child’s birth. Or that the poppy seeds in her salad could trigger a positive result on a urine drug screen, the quick test that hospitals often use to check pregnant patients for illicit drugs. Many common foods and medications—from antacids to blood pressure and cold medicines—can prompt erroneous results.

If Horton had been tested under different circumstances—for example, if she was a government employee and required to be tested as part of her job—she would have been entitled to a more advanced test and to a review from a specially trained doctor to confirm the initial result.

  • GhostalmediaEnglish
    130•2 months ago

    A lot of this article is about drug testing, but this also should remind people how much chaos one shitty, or overworked, nurse can cause.

    • Aviandelight
      69•2 months ago

      Omg yes! I perform drug testing and I’ve had instances where nurses called CPS before we could give them a confirmation result causing mayhem for all involved. It makes me want to scream whenever I see screening tests used as evidence against people. Any hospital or government agency making those kinds of decisions based on a screen should be sued to high hell. Also fun fact really high levels of Benadryl will cause you to pop positive for PCP on most drug screens. I’ve had to talk a handful of pediatricians down about that over the years too.

      • GhostalmediaEnglish
        26•2 months ago

        I had a fun event a year ago where I woke up in a Covid ward after surgery because a nurse saw antibodies on a pre-surgery Covid test.

        I had covid about a month before, that’s why I still had detectable antibodies. The doctors all knew that. That’s why they admitted me and performed the procedure.

        You should have to clear something past an actual doctor if some things are going to get escalated.

        • @Zahille7
          1•2 months ago

          I honestly thought that was the case this entire time