Mum Injected 9-Year-Old With Own Urine

A 42-year-old Hunter Valley woman arrested earlier this year for trying to poison her nine-year-old daughter faced court in NSW yesterday.

The courts allege that the women injected the girl’s own urine into her body via in IV line to make her sick.

The girl, now in state care, was admitted to hospital just prior to her mother’s arrest with a number of medical issues, including life threatening renal failure. The charge sheets content that at sometime during the period in hospital the mother tried to poison the girl. Independent medical witnesses have corroborated that at some point between 5:24pm on March 11 and 5:42am the next morning, the Hunter Valley woman injected vials of urine into her daughter’s central venous line. She is also accused of giving her other tables that caused further issue.

Doctors involved in the girl’s case had never before seen the kind of life-threatening infections that the child was suffering, and police arrested and charged the woman not long after for poisoning her child. Vials of urine were found in her handbag. She was later granted bail on the condition that she have no contact with the child or with any medical professionals at the hospital and care facilities where her daughter is treated.

What is most interesting, or perhaps disturbing, about this case is the mother at the centre of it is a former ‘mummy blogger’. During the years leading up to her arrest she ran several very public fundraising appeals for her child’s ill health. As well as the damage the courts allege the mother inflicted, the child also suffers from an auto-immune disease.

This case, although disturbing, is not the first one in recent years where a parent or carer has deliberately harmed a child for reasons that most logical adults cannot comprehend. In fact this situation is a recognised, but rare, mental illness called Munchausen by Proxy.

Munchausen by Proxy is a mental illness in which a parent or carer intentionally makes a child sick in order to satisfy a craving for attention. This attention is often sought from medical professionals, but also from family, friends and the public.

One of the most recent and hard-hitting cases of Munchausen by Proxy to shake the local community of mothers was the case of Lacey Spears and her son Garnett. Five-year-old Garnett was hospitalised a number of times in his young life, and it was only just before his death in 2014 that doctors realised why. He had a high level of sodium in his body, but it was so high as to be considered metabolically impossible. His mother Lacey was poisoning him with sodium.

Spears was convicted of second-degree murder, although some mental health experts believe that she may not have intended to kill Garnett, only make him sick for the attention. Others think she might have killed him intentionally to stop him talking to doctors about what she was doing.

However, this recent case is much more close to home, and although we aren’t yet sure what the outcome will be, at least this little girl will be safe from her mother from now on.