God's gift to moms: Mommy Gut

If I had one iota of advice to offer new moms is that you should always listen to your Mommy Gut.
Camdyn is an amazing little girl - she is full of energy and LOVES to eat. (19 pounds at 5 months!) Tuesday, December 21st, 2010 was the day of Camdyn's vaccinations. I am weary of vaccinations and I requested that they be split up. This day, she received the second half of the vaccines she should have had at her 4 month checkup. That night, Camdyn was VERY fussy. More so than usual. She always has her "witching hour" where she is tired and cranky, but I could tell she just didn't feel well. I chalked it up to being sore from her shots. The next morning, Camdyn refused to eat all of her bottle. She pushed it away after 2 ounces. She was lethargic all morning, and was very whiney. I had this overwhelming gut feeling that something was very wrong. I feared that she was having a vaccine reaction and called my doctor's office. I explained what was going on, and the nurse asked me if she was running a fever. When I told her no, she told me that kids could act fussy for up to 72 hours after receiving shots and without a fever, there was nothing they could do.

That night, I changed Camdyn's diaper before bed. In it, I found a blood-tinged discharge that shook me. I knew that this was NOT normal. The next morning, I called the doctor's office and demanded that they see us. Dr. Landis was in the office this morning. He looked at her, and thought that she perhaps had a UTI. This diagnosis required a catheter to confirm. I helped the nurses hold down my baby as they inserted the cath. She didn't have very much urine in her bladder- only enough to confirm a UTI, but not enough to also perform a urine culture to determine its cause. Dr. Landis asked us to feed her so that we could draw out some more urine. We tried breastmilk, formula and pedialyte. Camdyn refused it all. Because of his fear of dehydration, he sent us to Children's Hospital in Atlanta. Here they hooked her up to an IV, drew out more urine, took some blood and pumped an antibiotic into her. They sent us home that night.

The next morning at 4:30 am, my phone rang. A nurse from Children's was calling to let me know that Camdyn's blood culture came back positive for gram negative rods. This was not good and we needed to bring Camdyn back right away. We were admitted, and then finally told that the final diagnosis was EColi. We had to spend 5 days in the hospital. (Not exactly the first Christmas we had imagined celebrating with Camdyn!) Watching my little girl have to go through so much pain was the hardest thing I have ever had to endure. The ecoli was in her urine, causing a UTI and now in her blood; she was one sick little girl.

I knew something was wrong and had I listened to the original nurse's advice, I would have let Camdyn go on for 72 hours, and who knows what kind of damage the EColi could have wreaked in that span of time. Instead, I listened to my Mommy Gut and my baby is back to her normal, sassy self.