Blood testing for cocaine is a very short-term. For that to be true, the daughter would have had to have been a regular user right up to the day of the arrest and they would have had to have immediately made a decision on intake to do a blood test.
That really all seems unlikely. The CPS documentation as released also says nothing about blood being drawn or blood tests. If they were going to re-test, the most likely thing they would have done is more extensive tests on the hair samples they took.
This was an added reason to take every last pixel of BBN's post with a metric ton of salt, because it's already documented ITT that the hair test samples were taken near the time of the May 23rd arrest, followed by Nick's comments at the May 28th hearing foreshadowing test results that had not come back yet, after which hair test results were first announced by what the GAL "just got back" as of the June 6th hearing. There would have been no point to doing a blood test for cocaine or metabolites after that two-week delay, so the only way one would have been done is if one of the children, one of the parents, Aaron/April, or someone in the community told CPS in late May that there's a very specific reason to do a blood test ASAP, and there have been no publicly known signs that anyone said any such thing.
On the other hand, there is another possible way BBN's comment
might make sense: notably he only said "confirmation of the exposure by blood testing," not necessarily blood testing
for cocaine or cocaine metabolites. What other kind of blood testing could pertain to cocaine exposure? The question reminded me of some
past discussion ITT speculating that rhabdomyolysis could explain Nick's ghoulish appearance, which then reminded me that just as creatine kinase levels in the blood can detect damage to skeletal muscle in a rhabdo patient, similarly there would have to be blood tests pertinent to detecting damage to cardiac muscle in a pediatric patient exposed to dangerous amounts of cocaine, would there not?
Sure enough there are, and although important biomarkers like CK, CK-MB, and myoglobin typically return to normal levels within a few days after cardiac muscle damage, the most commonly tested biomarker can look back further back in time than the few days that a blood test for cocaine metabolites would have:
(LINK)
Common sense would further dictate that whenever hair test results comes back with levels as high as in this case, CPS' standard operating procedure would
have to be referring the child to new medical testing and care in that regard, and searching back through docs in this case there are at least some signs consistent with that having happened. First off, about three weeks after the hair test results came back,
the state's disclosures to Nick on June 26th included medical records pertaining to the children:
Now in all fairness, since those medical records were coupled with disclosure of "letters requesting medical records," it stands to reason that some or even all of the medical records disclosed on June 26th may have just been old pre-arrest records received from old pre-arrest care providers in response to the state's letter requests. However, the state notably disclosed a whole other
second round of medical records to Nick on July 5th with no accompanying second round of letter requests for those records:
This is just pure speculation here, but from the timing and wording of these separate disclosures of separate batches of medical records, one has to wonder whether at least some of the second batch of medical records pertained to medical testing and care that CPS would have obtained on its own
after the arrest in direct reaction to the hair test results. Could it be that this included a standard cardiac biomarker blood test, which came back with Troponin T levels so high that the appropriate diagnosis was recent cardiac tissue damage, of which the already-ascertained exposure to cocaine was the most likely cause? But surely that can't be, because Nick has said many a time that observation of a perfectly "healthy" child was proof that the hair test must have been bullshit. He would never lie about such a thing.
DISCLAIMER: IANAMD and am just googling through what Aaron calls "Nick's WebMD thing", i.e. probably talking out of my ass. Is there anyone ITT with any modicum of expertise on cardiac biomarker testing that could weigh in on this sort of thing?
