Gym Daycare Accidentally Feeds Baby the Wrong Breast Milk

Gym daycare seems like the best idea anybody has ever had. If I had one available near me, I think I would have had six-pack abs by two weeks postpartum. Well, OK, I probably wouldn’t have had six-pack abs, but I would at least have had clean hair. (Is it unethical to use the gym daycare just to take a shower in the locker room? Because I would have just been in the locker room reading magazines for hours.) The only problem is that sometimes people make mistakes, and when mistakes happen with babies it can be devastating, as happened to Tyler Treasure last week when her gym accidentally fed her son a bottle of someone else’s breast milk.

According to ABC News, Treasure left her 4-month-old baby at the gym daycare so she could work out. She did not leave a bottle with him and told the woman to whom she handed him that he did not have a bottle, and to come get her if he seemed fussy and needed to be fed. Then she went to her workout.

When she came back, however, someone at the daycare was giving her son a bottle.

“He didn’t have a bottle,” Treasure said. The woman feeding the baby at that point was probably like, “Oh shit.”

“Is that breast milk?” Treasure asked.

Yep. It was breast milk, and Treasure was pissed. The daycare reportedly apologized for the mistake, but Treasure says she does not accept the apology. She says she herself works at a daycare and knows the rules about handling breast milk, and she alleges that the bottle her son was given was not properly labeled to prevent exactly this kind of occurrence.

Treasure’s son is probably fine–plenty of babies drink donor milk and are fat and healthy for it–but it is only natural that all kinds of horror stories are playing themselves out in her head right now. What if the other mother has HIV? What if the other mother is on drugs or was full of alcohol when she pumped? All those situations seem unlikely, given that the other mother had specifically pumped the milk and left it to be fed to her own baby, so she probably didn’t have a pina colada full of Adderall in that bottle. Still, of course Treasure would worry.

Treasure says she wants her “sanity” back, and for her peace of mind she wants both her baby and the other mother tested for HIV, hepatitis, drugs, etc. I don’t think she can force the other mother to submit to medical tests like that, but if it were me I’d probably volunteer just for the sake of helping another person stop worrying a bit.