Sophia White-Straley

Sophia was born April 26th 2017. Everything with her birth was as normal as could be, no issues, no complications. She was a healthy beautiful baby. A couple weeks after getting home from the hospital I started noticing she wasn’t acting like herself, very fussy and seemed like she just didn’t feel right. I assumed it was just gas.

On May 15th, exactly 19 days after she was born I took her to the emergency room because she had a fever. They checked her temperature and it was 100.6. They took some blood and checked her urine. While we were waiting for the results I noticed a red “splotch” on her chest that hadn’t been there… I mentioned it but nothing much was said about it. They told me a few hours later that everything looked fine and the only other thing they could do was a spinal tap, but the ER doctor wanted to leave that decision up to her doctor. They called her doctor to see if he wanted her to stay overnight he told them no, he didn’t think it was necessary but wanted me to take Sophia into his office the next morning.

I took her into her pediatricians office and he checked her and told me he thought maybe it wasn’t just a virus, and the red “splotch” could be a rash, as viruses sometimes cause rashes. The doctor said as long as she is eating and having wet diaper not to worry too much, and to give her Tylenol for her fevers. On the 18th, my mom had mentioned that she noticed Sophia wasn’t really moving her right leg, and that she had it drawn up to her body. I started watching closely and that night when I went to change her she started screaming. I grabbed her diaper bag and headed out the door to the ER for the second time in a week. I cried the whole way there thinking I was failing my daughter, this was the second trip to the ER and I felt like the worlds worst mother..little did I know I was saving her life.

I thought my trip to the ER was for her leg. When the ER doctor came in she said Sophia still had a temp and she was very uncomfortable with this and told me she wanted to do a spinal tap. I just stood there in complete shock, I thought she was getting better and that I was there for her leg. All I could do was cry, my little baby was going to have a spinal tap done. She told me that Monday night they didn’t have ALL the results back from the tests, and that they found bacteria in her blood. At this point, I was a blubbering mess.

I was googling and all I saw was the word “sepsis.” They attempted to get spinal fluid twice and when she couldn’t the second time and didn’t have anymore kits to do the spinal on Sophia, she told me she didn’t have time to wait, that she felt she needed to start Sophia on antibiotics right away and then she told me they were transporting us to another hospital, this was just the beginning of a two week long stay in the hospital. I was then told she had staph in her blood. By this point the “splotch” on her chest had turned into a bump. They did an x-ray on her chest and didn’t see anything. They also did an x-ray on her hip/leg and saw nothing. The doctor was very uncomfortable with the results from the x-ray of her hip/leg and decided to have an ultrasound done. The ultrasound also showed nothing so he decided to have an MRI done. They did an ultrasound of the bump on her chest and saw that it was fluid filled. So they decided that the bump needed to be drained and sent to the lab to be tested. They decided to do this both on the same day.

She went into surgery and had the bump on her chest drained and then she went and had the MRI done. The results from the drainage of the bump and the results from her MRI came back. The “bump” on her chest was full of infection. Staph. (Sepsis and Bacterial Infection) And her hip muscle had infection in it as well. All I could do was ask myself how this happened. She had no “entry way” for the staph. Two weeks of IV antibiotics and her CRP level was down low enough that I could take my baby home, I just had to give her oral antibiotics. This whole ordeal isn’t exactly over for us, we have to go back to the infectious disease doctor in a month to have her immune system checked, because they don’t understand how she got it like she did. I thank god every day that I took her back to the hospital. (Sepsis and Children)

Source: Kayla Straley (Sophie's mother)