The Hospital Stay

I have put some posts for the record over at atomictumor dot com. You can see them here and here.

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The hospital stay has come and gone. The family is back together. The kids are asleep. It’s quiet. Our household is bigger.

My dad and I went out this evening to get dinner from chick-flick. I told him I never imagined having such a large family. He told me about his uncle who had seven children. They had a big kitchen table with a bench. I liked that story, because we have a big table with two benches. We can spread out and eat our food like a big family.

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Saturday evening at around 8:30 PM a nurse came in the room and said she had to take Leo right then. His blood work came back suggesting he was group b strep positive. In case you don’t know, that’s some nasty shit. According to information given to us by the hospital, there’s a 50% mortality rate with this bacteria. When the pediatrician called a second time to say bloodwork was favoring a diagnosis of group b, I started to freak out. One minute he’s fine and the next thing on the horizon is another feeding. Then it’s a killer bacteria.

But there were factors which gave us hope. He was asymptomatic. His white blood cell count was “normal.” We had a jump start on the antibiotics. All we could do was wait for the culture to grow and show us what exactly we were dealing with. Was it a contaminate that threw a false positive, or the real deal?

Sunday morning came with results. Our pediatrician told us it was not group b strep, but a strep contaminate of a different variety that had gotten into the blood work. We were out of the woods.

~ by The Bosphorus on January 15, 2007.