Mom grateful for help after young daughter’s crystal meth scare

It was supposed to be a nice wrap-up to her daughter’s fourth birthday party, but it turned into a scary emergency that forced Chelsi Melle to rush her child to the hospital in Estevan.

Melle and her family had just finished celebrating her daughter Addison’s fourth birthday; they were cleaning up their campsite at the Boundary Dam campground, about eight kilometres south of Estevan.

They planned to drop off a gift bag with one of the girls who attended the party, but left the bag behind.

That’s when Addison found a small, closed glass jar on the road in front of their campsite. She thought the white stuff inside was glitter, Chelsi said, and ate some of it.

“(She) started spitting, and she said, ‘Eww, that tasted like metal,’ ” Chelsi said. “I started asking, ‘What do you have? What’s in your mouth?’ And she gave me a little black container that was filled with a white residue.

“I kind of had a freak-out, and my son gave me the lid, and it was inscribed with a couple swear words.”

She would later find out at the hospital the substance was crystal meth.

Chelsi, her husband and her in-laws rushed the child to hospital. She said her daughter was starting to show abnormal symptoms.

“She was not herself. She had dilated pupils, she was very fidgety, and we thought maybe it was a combination of a sugar high from the birthday cake. She was just not her,” Chelsi said.

“(Addison) was blinking a whole bunch, and she told me she felt sugary. She kept telling me she couldn’t move her arms, while she was moving them and staring at them.”

The girl was admitted to the intensive care unit for treatment. Her parents gave the container to the Estevan Police, who eventually confirmed the substance to be crystal meth.

Estevan police eventually turned the case over to the RCMP to investigate how the drugs made it to the campground road in the first place.

Doctors told Addison’s family that she would be OK.

“She’s back to normal, they told us that there would be no residual effects, that she’d be fine. They had her on every monitor, they were amazing at the hospital. I couldn’t say anything more, I’m just grateful she didn’t ingest any more than she did,” her mom said.

Still, Chelsi said it’s shocking to think about where the glass container had been left.

“It was laying on the road, like the main road that is on the third row of the seasonal area of the campground, where 20 kids run up and down and play every single day,” she said.

She admitted she never would have expected such an incident to happen to her.

“You don’t think that that’s going to happen to you. You think that it’s a story you hear about on Facebook, because it’s somebody else’s kid. But it is very real, and stuff like this is in Estevan,” she said.

“I live in my nice little bubble thinking stuff like this doesn’t happen, but it does happen here.”

— With files from Nick Nielsen, Discover Estevan