Sunday, March 10, 2013

Massive Positive clouded with stupid negativity


Another milestone today.  Our little peanut had her isolette top opened all the way up, meaning all room air, no help breathing, the same stuff we all do, for better or worse for that matter.  It's a huge step for her to be able to go home.  In addition, this also means that she's able to maintain her own body temperature which is another requirement of going home.  True, she appears to be all bundled up in some blankets but so is her Mommy typically so no big surprise.  With both of those positives, I'll be honest, unfortunately Sally & I are pretty upset right now.  While this is awesome, it has been confirmed that Zoey now has "colonized" MRSA on her skin.  It's common in NICUs and hospitals, it's common for babies to have some form of STAPH on their skin, but it sholdn't be that common to have all this crap get transferred.
From our perspective, she got this while in the NICU from the other baby boy she shared nurses with as he was isolated a few days ago with the same diagnosis yet still shared the same nurse.  There are the only 2 babies that have it, so not too much of a stretch to figure out what happened, which couldn't be refuted by the doctors either.  The coincidences are just too much.  They don't want to do any blood draws to make sure she doesn't have it in her blood as it would create a port to then infect her blood.  This Friday marks the 6 week point post surgery meaning she's due for a reversal of the original surgery in short time, so when they have to cut her open to put her intestines back together she's at an even higher rate now for the MRSA to get to her blood during the surgery.  She has been moved back to an isolated room to prevent the spread of it and the nurses have to wear masks & gloves with every thing they do.  While not the end of the world, probably should have been a sign that she needed a different nurse when the last baby was diagnosed.  But that's not their policy and they claim it cannot spread that way.  So needless to say, we both hit our breaking point tonight and took turns melting down into a big sloppy mess to deal with all the stress and frustration.
While we cannot change the past, we are so pleased with her other positive steps forward and hope that this doesn't turn into a major set back for her.  They say it won't delay her surgery but now there are larger risks for infection than there were before.  As if we didn't feel it before, we are even more anxious to get Zoey home.  At this point, we are just trying to stay positive and make it through this without losing it on someone.  While writing this we got a call saying they were doing labs, which means a poke into the blood stream possibly infecting her blood with MRSA after just being told by the Neonatologist that they didn't want to do this for that exact reason.  So if they decide to poke her for it, then we told them we want her blood tested for MRSA.  Because they don't want to take more blood than they have to, and because she's not showing any signs that her blood is infected, they want to only take enough to test her nutritional levels to help her keep growing, but not to test for MRSA.  So we wait and see and hope for the best.  It will be interesting to see how tomorrow goes once we get down there.
Ray asked me to "un-Ray-ify" it so it wasn't too angry but still informational. While not taking all of his intensity out of it, I did calm it down some as we did with each other throughout the night. Hopefully some sleep will help and tomorrow we start fresh.

1 comment:

  1. I am so sorry that you guys are dealing with MRSA, and on such a tiny tot :o( All three of my boys and myself have all had to have it treated for an infection of it on our skin at some point, though none of us are colonized thankfully. Hopefully, after treatment Zoey won't be systemically colonized either. While MRSA sucks and it is a big deal, it sounds like it was caught early and should be relatively easy to treat. Unfortunately, MRSA is spread pretty easily, none of the 4 of us know how, when, or where we contracted it here, and it wasn't like we all got it at once, there were years in between each of us getting it, so it's just "out there" like the flu and every other awful germ. Praying Zoey's rockstar-ness continues and this passes relatively uneventfully for all of you. On the flip side...YAY for room air and YAY for almost 4 pounds!! I bet she feels huge compared to when she was first born huh? I love her chubby cheeks!! She's such a pretty baby :o)

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