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Tiffany Alberts, a 41-year-old mother, is being tried for six different counts of “aggravated battery” and another count of “neglect of a dependent resulting in serious bodily injury.” This dependent is Alberts’ own son.
The 15-year-old teen is currently receiving chemotherapy treatment for his leukemia at Riley Hospital for Children in Indianapolis, Indiana.
After the boy was allowed to return home after one round of his chemotherapy, however, he was immediately admitted back to the hospital because he’d developed a fever, diarrhea, and was constantly vomiting.
Doctors immediately recognized that the boy had developed a severe infection and would require surgeries to change his central venous line to save his life.
During these procedures, doctors realized that the boy’s blood contained cultures of organisms more commonly found in stool — feces. The doctors couldn’t possibly explain their presence in the boy’s system and decided to install surveillance cameras in the boy’s room to see if anyone else had been tampering with his treatment.
The video footage revealed that the boy’s own mother, Alberts, had been fiddling with her son’s IV bag.
She first explained that she had been trying to “flush the line” because the “medicine that was given to him burned.” Only later did she admit that she’d injected “fecal matter” into the bag, in hopes of getting her son to another unit to receive “better treatment.”
Although the boy has been showing signs of actual improvement, now that he’s no longer suffering from septic infections, doctors are worried that they’ve missed the time frame to bring his leukemia into remission.
There is still no word on how Alberts will be dealt with because of how she treated her son.
