Mom Says She Was Handed the Wrong Baby While at the Hospital: 'The Unthinkable Happened'
Poole Hospital in the UK said this week that it was investigating after an incident in which a new mother was handed the wrong baby
A new mom is sharing her story after she says the baby handed to her at a UK hospital was not her newborn daughter.
Maisie Beth, 22, shared that she only realized the baby was not her own when she went to change its diaper, and saw immediately that it was a boy.
Beth, who is from Poole in the UK, told her story on TikTok, which is captioned with the text: "My newborn baby was swapped at birth??? a true story time."
"Never in a million years did I think this was something I'd have to worry about, but yes, it did actually happen to us," Beth says in the video.
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After she gave birth to daughter Isabella in September 2023, Beth and the child were separated while the baby was placed in a nursery down the hall for photo-therapy treatments.
On night two in the hospital, Beth says, "the unthinkable happened."
After waking up at 3 a.m., Beth went to the bathroom and was walking down the hall when the nurses asked her to come into the office, where they said they had Isabella.
"This did raise a few little red flags just because I was told she wasn't allowed out of her photo-therapy lamp," Beth says, adding that the midwives told her Isabella had been removed from the nursery because she was crying and wouldn't settle.
Beth then took the baby presented to her, and headed back to her hospital room.
"After a couple of hours, just before breakfast, I asked the nurses when Isabella needed to go back under her lamp," she says.
The nurses then asked her to change Isabella's diaper and get her dressed and ready — and she immediately realized the baby she had been cuddling for hours was not her own.
"When I tell you I nearly had a heart attack," Beth says, adding: "I picked up the baby and I stormed into the office. All I saw was red and I was demanding for them to tell me where Isabella was because this was not my baby."
The reasoning the hospital gave for the mixup, Beth says, is that she looked "identical" to the other child's mom.
While Poole Hospital hasn't referenced the TikTok video nor Beth's name, it did say this week that it was investigating after an incident in which a new mother was handed the wrong baby.
University Hospitals Dorset NHS Foundation Trust, which runs Poole Hospital, told BBC in a statement that the incident was "isolated."
"We deeply regret any distress that was caused and have reached out to the mother to offer her support," Lorraine Tonge, director of midwifery at University Hospitals Dorset, told the outlet. "We would urge her to get back in touch with us to assist us in our investigation."
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