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An Australian 'mummy blogger' allegedly injected her ill daughter with urine.

It’s the sickening case that keeps getting stranger.

“This home is busy, challenging, noisy, chaotic and I love it – most of the time.”

So reads a blog entry by a well-known Australian “mummy blogger” who — just like thousands of stay-at-home parents around the country — recounted tales of her family’s joys, challenges and everyday trivialities online.

“I’m just a simple 30-something-year-old woman with a not-so-simple life,” the NSW mother said, explaining elsewhere that her daughter was ill and that she’d left her career to care for the child.

In a twist of events so bizarre they could be mistaken for a Hollywood horror plot, a NSW “mummy blogger” has been accused of injecting her daughter with urine as she lay in her hospital bed.

 

The woman’s detailed accounts of her daughter’s multiple hospital visits were heartbreaking at times, and were peppered with concerned remarks about the child’s various treatment plans.

“I want you to know that I love my daughter’s medical team. That doesn’t mean I like the decisions they’ve recently made,” she wrote in one entry, according to 7:30.

“I don’t want to expose my kids to anything that will harm them,” she said elsewhere.

At first glance, the 42-year-old woman’s musings seem the work of a dedicated, albeit lonely, mother who’d do anything to keep her little girl safe and well.

But if the allegations recently levelled against her are true, the opposite may be the case.

In a twist of events so bizarre they could be mistaken for a Hollywood horror plot, the prolific Hunter Valley blogger has been accused of injecting the innocent girl with urine as she lay in her hospital bed.

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Police also suspect the woman subjected her daughter to laxative abuse, saying the girl’s peeling skin and severe rash were consistent with that diagnosis, the ABC reports.

 

 

The NSW mother, who cannot be named for legal reasons, is expected back in court in December. (Screenshot: 7:30)

The accusations were first made in March, after the little girl — who was born with a genetic illness — was admitted to hospital with life-threatening renal failure.

A mixture of yeast and fungus began to grow in one of the nine-year-old child’s intravenous tubes in a way that suggested contamination by urine, according to the ABC News, and the alarm was raised.

Child Abuse Squad detectives from Newcastle began to investigate potential abuse, and the blogger was arrested at home and charged with using poison to endanger life or inflict grievous bodily harm, as well as assault causing actual bodily harm.

She was carrying urine samples, laxatives syringes in her handbag, police have now said.

If the allegations are true, the case could possibly be an instance of Munchausen syndrome by proxy. In June last year, a Gold Coast mother was jailed for six years after poisoning her four-year-old daughter with chemotherapy drugs to get attention. Then in April, US woman Lacey Spears — also a “mommy blogger” –was sentenced to 20 years to life in prison for poisoning her five-year-old son to death with salt.

 

It’s not for the media or the public to determine whether this woman is guilty. But if she is, it’s difficult to imagine the motivation for such an unspeakable act.

The woman, whose writing has featured on at least two popular Australian parenting websites, organised several community fundraisers related to her daughter’s illnesses. Through her mother’s blogging profile, the daughter even became a poster child for a charity that once arranged for her to dance at the Sydney Opera House alongside ballerinas, 7:30 reports.

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In one post published online, the accused NSW blogger wrote that she is grateful to blogging for exposing her to philanthropy, saying that helping others gave her “a feeling of worth”. She wrote elsewhere that the blogging community was her “lifeline”.

A mixture of yeast and fungus began to grow in one of the nine-year-old child’s intravenous tubes in a way that suggested contamination by urine.

Some commentators have suggested the allegations may indicate a possible case of Munchausen syndrome by proxy — a mental disorder and rare form of child abuse that involves the exaggeration or fabrication of illnesses by a parent.

But Munchausen syndrome by proxy is a controversial term, and  medical anthropologist Dr Hayward-Brown says she’s seen many women accused of the so-called condition where the women are not guilty.

“It’s called a ‘garbage bin diagnosis’, basically, so that if you don’t know what’s wrong, then you blame the mother,” she told 7:30.

 

The Hunter Valley mother faced Newcastle Local Court on Wednesday, but the matter was adjourned until December 2.

Whatever the truth of this sad sequence of events, we hope that justice prevails.