Take Care of Maya

I feel so bad for that family and what they went through, I don’t even know where to start. I watched the documentary Take Care of Maya on Netflix a couple months ago and it left a bad taste in my mouth. I couldn’t believe that a mother, trying to make her own daughter free of pain, would end up killing herself because of a hospital. When you go in because your child is sick, you expect to get the care needed and then go back home, taking care of your child, with peace of mind. Not having to worry that you will be accused of child abuse for bringing a sick child to the hospital. If you think about it, would people who truly abuse their child, or their pets, go to the hospital or vet to be found out about what they did ? No. Abusers don’t care about their victims’ well being.

Maya Kowalski began experiencing her symptoms when she was nine years old. Her chronic pain began with asthma attacks and severe headaches, lesions eventually formed on her arms and legs. Meanwhile, her feet cramped and curled into themselves, she would lose the ability to walk, even. Many doctors were puzzled by her symptoms and with at least one suggesting, it was all in her head.

I mean, you know, when doctors don’t have an answer to your medical condition, they usually are quick to dismiss you with “It’s all in your head” If we can’t see it, there is nothing wrong with you. Instead of trying to get to the bottom of the problem and reach out to the right people who can help. We see this happening way too often nowadays and a lot of people are left suffering in silence because of this. “But Maya would be crying 24/7,” her father says. “We knew she wasn’t faking.” A child that cries this much, you know that something is really wrong. It’s heart wrenching for a mother to feel powerless of not being able to help her child feel better.

The family back in 2015 were looking for answers everywhere, visiting countless doctors to find out what was wrong with their daughter. At the time, they didn’t know what was going on with her and what medical condition she was suffering from. Thanks to her mother Beata, loving her child and not giving up, refusing to watch Maya be in pain, she was then told about complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS), a rare neurological condition that can cause constant or intermittent pain in the extremities, a burning sensation and extreme sensitivity to touch, according to the Cleveland Clinic.

The condition can make even routine procedures, like taking a blood pressure reading, or getting an injection, excruciating. CRPS—otherwise known as complex regional pain syndrome is not very well known, even to this day. Not many people know about it. So it was difficult to get diagnosed, like many conditions who are still not very well known to this day. They finally found someone after it took them countless visits, missing work, having to travel far to finally get a proper diagnosis.

Anthony Kirkpatrick, an anesthesiologist and pharmacologist in Tampa, who specializes in CRPS officially diagnosed Maya with the condition, described it as “an abnormal function of the sympathetic nervous system…your senses get ramped up so if a drop of water touches your skin, it can feel like somebody’s jabbing you with a knife.” Kirkpatrick prescribed Ketamine treatments to Maya to manage the pain.

Ketamine is a dissociative anesthetic used medically for induction and maintenance of anesthesia. It is also used as a treatment for depression, a pain management tool, and as a recreational drug. Ketamine is a novel compound that was derived from phencyclidine in 1962 in pursuit of a safer anesthetic with fewer hallucinogenic effects. At anesthetic doses, ketamine induces a state of dissociative anesthesia, a trance-like state providing pain relief, sedation, and amnesia.

The distinguishing features of ketamine as anesthesia are preserved breathing and airway reflexes, stimulated heart function with increased blood pressure, and moderate bronchodilation. At lower, sub-anesthetic doses, ketamine is a promising agent for pain and treatment-resistant depression. As with many antidepressants, the results of a single administration of ketamine wane with time.

Kirkpatrick started treating Maya with infusions of the anesthetic drug ketamine, but Maya’s symptoms were persistent, so he suggested a more drastic treatment: a 5 day “ketamine coma” in which the nervous system, flooded with a high dose of the drug, is essentially “reset.” The procedure is still experimental and not approved by the FDA, so the family needed to travel to Mexico to have it done. Although risky, Jack says “it was the only hope we had,” ultimately helped her debilitating symptoms.

“I felt amazing,” Maya recalls. Afterward, she continued to receive ketamine infusions to control her flare-ups due to CRPS, a disorder that can be managed but not cured, Dr. Kirkpatrick says. A lot of people also seem to forget that this condition can be constant OR intermittent. You have flares up, like autoimmune disease or neurological ones that sometimes COME and GO. It doesn’t mean you are in pain 24h, 7/7, which in the trial, they went snooping in on Maya’s Facebook pictures, seeing her partying, thinking, well she must not be in pain.

But, in October 2016 Maya was rushed to the emergency room at Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital in St. Petersburg, Florida with crippling stomach pain. Her parents explained to the medical team that Maya had CRPS. Beata — who was trained as a registered nurse — pleaded with doctors to administer a high dose of ketamine, the one treatment they believed was effective for their daughter’s pain. I mean, Beata would know after all, she was a nurse and saw the experiment work on Maya. Unfortunately, that treatment was experimental, but only allowed in Mexico, because it’s not approved with the FDA in the United States.

That request raised concerns among hospital staff, who alerted child protective services. An investigative team later accused Beata of child abuse due to Munchausen syndrome by proxy (MSP), a mental disorder in which a caretaker of a child either makes up fake symptoms or causes real symptoms to make it appear that the child is injured or ill. Now, I can understand why this would raise suspicion, when a mother is asking a hospital to administer their child a high dose of a drug.

A court-ordered psychological evaluation eventually determined Beata did not have the mental illness, but less than a week after Maya checked into Johns Hopkins, she was placed in state custody and remained in the hospital, away from her family for more than three months. This is absolutely disgusting to have done that to this family when Beata was cleared by the court to not have the mental illness. Why did they even bother with the court evaluation ?

“One day I was in the ICU, and my mom kissed me on the forehead and was like, ‘I love you. I’ll see you tomorrow.’ I never saw her again,” Maya recalls. “I was medically kidnapped. I tried being hopeful, but there was a point where I thought, ‘I’m never getting out of this place.’ She was, indeed, kidnapped by the hospital. It is beyond me, that without any proof that the child is physically, or mentally abused, the state would allow such a thing to happen to a family. This is quite scary to say the least.

Without any contact with her daughter, Beata “was deteriorating,” Jack says. “She would stay up, research and hardly eat.” And when a judge in a hearing denied Beata the chance to give her daughter a hug, it “destroyed her,” Jack says. Beata was inconsolable afterward. How can you blame her ? They wouldn’t allow this mother, even under supervision at least, to give a hug to her own child. They denied her any form of physical contact. Their phone calls were even monitored at all times and Beata was not allowed to say certain things or even mention the word ketamine.

After more than 87 days without her daughter, Beata died by suicide in January of 2017, at the age of 43. “I’m sorry,” she wrote in an email discovered after her death, “but I no longer can take the pain of being away from Maya and being treated like a criminal. I cannot watch my daughter suffer in pain and keep getting worse.” 

“This little girl was already hurting, and now I had to tell her that her mother’s passed,” Jack says. “It was horrible.”

The hospital is to blame for the mother taking her own life as well as breaking apart this family and taking the young children’s mother away from them, at such a young age. I cannot even imagine what they went through and the pain of having to live every day, without their loving mother who only wanted what was best for her daughter, to live a life pain free.

Of course, Five days later Maya was released into her dad’s custody and returned home to Venice, Florida, since the mother was gone. While there, she struggled with both the pain of her condition and the grief from her mother’s death. Jack says her health had also regressed while in the hospital due not receiving ketamine treatments. A court order prevented her from continuing ketamine after her release, thanks to the hospital for caring so much about a child’s pain. 

Instead, the family had to turn to other therapies, and as a result, her recovery was slower and more painful than it needed to be. “We worked with her slowly: water therapy, things like that,” says Jack “But it was horrible — after losing my wife, I thought my daughter was next.” It was a year and a half until she was able to walk unassisted again.

Today, Maya has full use of her arms and legs, but some nights the pain still causes her to cry out. “I do my best to push through,” she says. “I’ve already missed a lot, so I want to make the most of life now.”

Did you know that this is even a lot bigger than the Kowalski ? If you watch the entire Netflix documentary, you will see that the hospital has countless of other false accusation of child abuse through many parents having had to deal with child abuse accusation through the years when bringing a sick child in. They too, became the system’s target. According to Sally Smith, who worked for the hospital, a lot of parents were “abusing” their children, by bringing them to the hospital, to get help for their sick child. One mother was arrested and imprisoned, and her child put in foster care.

DR Sally Smith, who worked for the hospital, was the mastermind behind all that, trying to influence doctors as well, about Maya’s mother, suggesting that they should monitor what Maya was doing online on her laptop to make sure she wasn’t in contact with her mother. The hospital was trying to influence Maya by telling her that her mother was trying to do things to her and making up her CRPS… as disgusting as that. They were trying to turn this poor innocent child against her own mother by putting false thoughts into her head.

I hope that the Kowalski family win their lawsuit, not for the money, but as a sign that what the hospital did was unacceptable and that they are guilty of what they did to that poor mother. I strongly suggest you watch Take Care of Maya on Netflix, if you have not. It’s frustrating to say the least, to watch a poor family go through what they did. I’m glad they exposed the hospital. Be careful if you bring your child there. You never know who will accuse you of child abuse so it seems. Does this mean that we shouldn’t take our kids in anymore if anything happens to them, for fear of having them taken away ? What is this society turning into ? Real child abuse a lot of the times if left ignore, while a loving parent, doing what they can, has their own child taken away from them… It is sickening to give a hospital so much power that they can literally kidnap your child without any solid proof of actual abuse.

What are your thoughts on what happened to this family ?