Of all the things I found to worry about when I was pregnant, birth wasn’t one of them.

I was the person who cracked jokes during childbirth classes. I was confident my body knew what to do and would do it when the baby was ready to be born. I had a birth plan, a doula, and a playlist that I created months in advance. Nobody was more prepared than me or more relaxed than I was going into the maternity ward.

Of course, I didn’t plan on wrongly testing positive for methamphetamine when I was in labor. That’s when the trouble began.

I recently shared this story in detail for Narratively, but here's the abbreviated version.

I’m a crunchy, granola woman who didn’t even take Tylenol during my pregnancy.

I was careful about the food I ate, following every conventional rule about what I should and shouldn't consume for a healthy pregnancy. When I was eight months along and received my Master’s Degree, I celebrated after graduation with one sip of champagne. One sip.

That’s why a positive meth test was so far outside my reality, at first I thought it was a joke.

Or, I figured, maybe some bleary-eyed lab tech mixed up the urine samples. It was a simple misunderstanding. (Heck, I wasn't even aware that a drug test had been administered, but I learned later that drug screening was standard procedure in this maternity ward.)

I offered to give another sample, never imagining that test would also come back positive for meth. But that’s exactly what happened.

From that point on, the blissful birth experience I imagined was stolen from me. I was no longer a patient, I was two positive meth tests.

After my child was born, plastic bags were wrapped around his penis to collect urine for drug samples.

I was told I couldn’t breastfeed my son. When I fought to nurse him anyway, I was labeled a combative patient. Then I was visited by the hospital social worker, who said Child Protective Services might have to get involved.

My husband and I deduced that my prescription asthma inhaler must have been the cause of the false positives, because there was nothing else in my system that could have registered as any kind of drug. Twice. We found information online linking false positives to my particular inhaler, (which the hospital actually had on file and administered to me), but when we showed a website to one of the nurses, she rolled her eyes.

"Anyone can find anything online," she said.

I felt like the crazy person who had to argue my own sanity, and nobody believed me.

We spent four long, lonely days in the hospital before my son and I were released to go home. Our first few weeks were dark and dismal. Fearing a visit from CPS, I kept the curtains drawn and refused to be away from my son, not even long enough to step into the next room.

I had a mighty struggle with postpartum depression, and now I wonder how much of that was triggered by the fear that someone could take away my baby. At one point I had myself convinced that I shouldn’t get too attached to my child, since he was going to be removed from my care anyway.

Three weeks after my son was born, the hospital contacted us. They sent my urine to an outside lab for a different type of screening, and the results were negative. However, the lingering dread, the depression, and the anxiety? That took far longer to clear.

Since writing my story for Narratively, I've heard from families all over the country who suffered through similar situations. There are mothers who ate poppyseed bagels and tested positive for opiates. Some took cold medicine and were treated like criminals. There are ladies who still don't know why their screens were positive for drugs.

I understand the difficult position of the hospital staff, who have an obligation to care for babies in a world where some mothers do take drugs. But the reality also is that drug screens are imperfect.

All women deserve dignity during labor, and some rational guidelines would go a long way toward preventing my story from happening to anyone else.

Has anyone else ever had a crazy brush with the powers that be?

This post was originally published in May of 2016