KEY POINTS:
In the first 9 weeks of her pregnancy before she knew she was pregnant, Karyn Tunnicliff celebrated her own and a friend's 21st birthdays.
"We did nothing but drink for five days," she says.
"I found out a week after I was 21 that I was pregnant. It scared the bejesus out of me."
Ms Tunnicliff is happy to be an object lesson to young women about the dangers of drinking because she's angry that no one told her of the risks.
At the time, 15 years ago in New Plymouth, her doctor told her: "One drink a week isn't going to harm your child."
"I drank right through my pregnancy," she says. "I didn't know. There had been no warnings whatsoever."
When her daughter Jaymee was born, she realised almost immediately that something was wrong.
"She was a screamer till six or eight weeks," she says.
"We put her on solids at three weeks, the more we fed her the better. By eight weeks she was having soup in a bottle, it was great because she slept. That was alcohol withdrawal."
She was a super-advanced toddler.
By six months she was saying proper words, by 10 months she was walking.
"I started asking for help when she was 18 months old because she was really advanced. They said she's just an intelligent child developing normally, but I knew she was different."
She was hyperactive. Ms Tunnicliff "couldn't keep her occupied". By age 7 she would be up at 5am and still going at midnight.
At 8 or 9 she was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and prescribed Ritalin and Rubifen. They just made the sleeplessness worse.
Ms Tunnicliff, who has brought up Jaymee and a younger daughter on her own - "her father didn't want to know" - took her off Ritalin and Rubifen and put her on to melatonin supplements, which finally helped her to sleep normally. Removing extra sugar also helped.
She had long suspected that Jaymee might be suffering from fetal alcohol syndrome, but her local doctors scoffed at the idea.
Finally, three years ago, she found a paediatrician at Waikato Hospital, Dr John Goldsmith, who confirmed that Jaymee had mild physical markers of the syndrome based on the gap between the eyes, the width of the eyes and an indistinct or lacking indentation in the skin above the top lip.
The diagnosis was too late to make much difference, as Ms Tunnicliff had already found ways to set rules for Jaymee which have helped her do well.
She's still poorly co-ordinated and accident-prone, but she is now "a beautiful girl, well behaved, a good role model for her little sister".
But she wants something done for others.
"The Government has a lot to answer for because they don't have labels on bottles," she says.
All alcoholic drinks in the United States have carried warnings since 1989 that "women should not drink alcoholic beverages during pregnancy because of the risk of birth defects".
The Alcohol Advisory Council wants similar warning labels here but they need to be agreed on by Food Standards Australia NZ.
* Alcohol and Drug Helpline, 0800 787 797. Fetal Alcohol Support Trust: fast@xtra.co.nz
