SOUL SACRIFICE –
Jan. 26, 2026 – On April 18, 2005, a Canadian woman named Rani Jamieson gave birth to a healthy boy. It was an unremarkable pregnancy but a painful delivery; a doctor had to use surgical scissors to make room for her son’s head. Afterward, the doctor prescribed her Tylenol No. 3, which combines the mild opioid codeine with acetaminophen.
Rani’s newborn son weighed almost eight pounds and had perfect neonatal scores. “He seemed very—like an old soul,” she told a Canadian news outlet. She and her husband, Douglas, named him Tariq. He was their only child.
The hospital gave Rani two tablets of Tylenol-3 in the morning and two at night. But she found that the pills made her drowsy, so, on the third day of Tariq’s life, she cut her intake to one pill at a time. She and Tariq were discharged from the hospital and went home. Rani, who was thirty-two, had been preparing for motherhood for a long time. “Anytime I read an article about something you shouldn’t do, or they’re not sure—that went on my list of things not to do,” she said.Douglas called the Ontario health ministry’s telehealth service. He said that Tariq had been sleeping for most of the past twenty hours, and that his skin was fluctuating in color. An ambulance was dispatched to the Jamiesons’ home, in an affluent neighborhood of Toronto. But, according to the Jamiesons, “a minute or two” before it arrived Tariq stopped breathing.
