Our holiday was lovely but, it seems we have brought home with us our old friend, the staph infection.
I’m not sure where it jumped on board (I’m thinking swimming pool) but it is affecting the kids in various ways.
Ivy’s ear is discharging the most foul of goop. (After almost four years of dealing with goop, it’s pretty easy to identify that it is this horrible little bug that is growing in my daughter’s ear).
There are varying levels of infected mosquito bites and green gunky noses but that is not the worst of it.
Two of the kids have terrible staphy abscesses.
Imogen has handled it quite well but Mal is the other child who is suffering with this infliction.
Mal is usually a very healthy little guy and so when he is sick… well, in his own words…
he is “a man in pain”.
Enough said.
The cyst is sitting just behind his knee and so he cannot straighten his leg out. I have tried to explain about his needing to do this, so as to avoid other complications but it has been difficult to say the very least.
My biggest fear is stricture, where his muscles and joints stiffen to a point where he is bent up permanently.
As a nurse, I have spent many a shift trying to massage out tight muscles to avoid stricture. It’s not nice for the patient. It’s painful.
Most of the day yesterday was spent doing this with Mal. It was exhausting for him and for me but the worst thing was not being able to communicate with him. For the life of me I could not get him to understand that he needed to relax his leg.
Antibiotics and pain relief and lots of TLC from all of the people in the house could not get him to straighten up.
Things were getting hairy.
I had visions of having to take Mal to the emergency room and how he would cope with that. Every time I mentioned the doctor, he would go into some weird howling frenzy and beg me not to take him there
but things were bad and the ER was becoming a reality, if for nothing else but some local anaesthetic and lancing of the abscess.
Finally, with AJ (his brother) at Mal’s head and all the other kids positioned along the bed with tissues (for the tears), water (his one need during the process was water, LOTS of water) and chocolate eggs (for nourishment, of course, okay bribery) and hours of massaging, I just took a deep breath and pushed his leg and hip slowly out of its curled up postition.
He screamed like I was killing him and was calling out random things like;
“My brother! It’s goodbye!”
but
it worked.
For most of the afternoon, Mal was pain free and straight.
This morning, the antibiotics have kicked in. He is still hobbling and a little bent but alot better, on the whole.
I don’t think we will need to go to the hospital over Easter (and his birthday, which is on Monday).
It got me to thinking though, how would I do it? With Ivy, she is generally too sick to care and even when I have had to go with Noah, he has been fairly agreeable
but with Mal, who would be scared out of his wits, with all of the lights and noise and strangers, how would it go?
If yesterday was anything to go by, not very well, I imagine.
So, I thought I might throw it out here, into a universe that has experience.
I’d love to hear your ideas, your stories, your experiences, so in the event that Mal does need emergent care, I can help him to get through it in the best possible way.
I read this entry with interest. I developed a staph infection while treated at Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak in 2005 for 7 fractures I received in a bike accident. I had open wounds which were never cleaned, although both my husband and I asked about it SEVERAL times. We were told that they would heal better without treatment. Given all the other things going on at the time, that was the least of our concerns. However, I did develop a staph infection. The pain this infection caused me was more than all the fractures combined. I figured out what the blisters were by researching it online. The orthopedic doctors told me I was wrong. I immediately left and went to my internal medicine doctor. She took two blood tests and put me on an antibiotic. Twenty four hours later I was readmitted to the infectious disease unit. It was horrible.
All these memories came flooding in when I read this post. This brave young man was not overreacting. The pain from this infection is amazing. I applaud this nurse/mom for her efforts to keep her kids healthy and pain free. Too bad other medical professionals do not take the issue as seriously. I say a prayer tonight that her kids do not end up in the hospital and that by writing this, others of you are able to advocate for yourself and your loved ones and avoid ever getting a staph infection!
I took the liberty of including this post on my blog about advocating for elders, people with disabilities and their families. http://pattidudek.typepad.com/pattis_blog/