One day, parents Mark Sutherland and Natalie White turned to doctors for help. After each feeding, their seven-week-old baby became nervous and started screaming at the whole house.
The doctors decided that it was ordinary colic. But the parents felt that everything was much more serious. When, after one particularly difficult and sleepless night, baby Callan’s face was swollen and covered with red spots, the boy’s mother again took him to the hospital.
“Do you think your seven-year-old daughter Lucy or your husband is capable of hitting a child?” The sudden question of the doctor puzzled Natalie.
“Of course not!” – answered the woman, but they did not believe her. The doctors took the baby away, and the boy’s father was told that they would open a case against him for child abuse.
For five agonizing days, the couple did not know anything about what was happening to their baby. During this time, they were interviewed by more than two dozen different inspectors.
“We were told we cannot stay with any of our children unattended,” Natalie says. – And then they took up their daughter Lucy. They asked our girl a lot of questions. They even called her school and told them that we were suspected of child abuse. “
“We were absolutely devastated,” Natalie says, painfully remembering how she was not allowed to visit her little son.
And soon Callan’s father was arrested. Doctors tried to find evidence that a man beats his child: they made two X-rays of the whole body, computed tomography and a bunch of tests.
“And I had to stand and watch how three nurses put pressure on my son’s little bones when he squealed during examinations,” my mother recalled. Her social network page is still full of photos that are painful to look at: an exhausted face, eyes swollen from tears, and a limp body of a baby on her hands. “What to do, the police believe that these spots on the cheek are signs of beatings,” she bitterly replied to the comments.
The woman decided to see another doctor. It was he who suggested that the spots on the child’s skin were an allergy to milk.
And indeed, when the mother fed the baby with lactose-free milk, there were no more tantrums and spots.
Only after the diagnosis was confirmed, Callan’s father was released from prison. However, neither he nor his wife received any apologies.
“I understand that the police have to protect children, but they could at least listen to me,” Natalie says. “I hope none of the families will go through the hell we went through.”