Dad David shares his experience:
“In December 2023 we welcomed into the world our beautiful baby boy, Bowen Jax Heritage. We were in our perfect baby bubble and couldn’t have been more in love with our new addition. However, at just three weeks old my wife had an overwhelming feeling that something wasn’t right, there were absolutely no signs other than being a bit more unsettled than he had been typically.
That evening, my wife insisted that we got Bowen checked out in A&E and thank goodness we did. Even though he was peacefully sleeping on arrival at the hospital, his heart rate had spiked to 230 BPM and he took a serious turn for the worse. Straight away we were rushed into urgent care where they started checking him for heart conditions – thankfully the results came back fine.
Within an hour of arriving in A&E, Bowen stopped breathing four times and lost all colour in his face and body. We were rushed into resuscitation where we were surrounded by doctors and then transferred to intensive care after Bowen had stabilised. Whilst being transferred we were followed by medical staff carrying oxygen and a defibrillator just in case he took a turn on the short journey to ICU (Intensive Care Unit).
We will never forget the words after asking: “Is he going to die?” No parent wants to hear: “Your son is critically ill, but he’s in the right place.”
At that moment, my mother-in-law reminded us that my wife had tested positive for group B Strep in pregnancy. This was found coincidentally during a UTI test during her pregnancy. At the time she was told not to worry as the chance of it affecting a newborn is unheard of, especially as she was having a caesarean section. She was given no information during pregnancy of what to look out for, so we just put it out of our minds and never considered that it could be something our newborn son would contract after birth.
Bowen was initially being treated for Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) and they were talking about ventilating him. However, once they started treating him for group B Strep infection as a precaution, his condition improved. He was in hospital for a week and he had no veins left due to them collapsing. He was covered in tubes and we couldn’t feed him – he had multiple lumbar punctures and there were an endless amount of tests.
Once we got the diagnosis of group B Strep sepsis and potential meningitis we realised just how poorly he was.
Thankfully it wasn’t meningitis and we are extremely grateful that our baby boy was a little fighter. He’s gone from being on the 9th percentile and underweight to being our 6-month-old, happy and healthy little chunk. He was lucky that he improved and we are so thankful that we took him that day. If he wasn’t seen, the outcome could’ve been very different.
We are incredibly grateful to the staff that dealt with Bowen throughout; to the doctors, practitioners, nurses, consultants, night staff – the care and compassion each person showed our family helped us through a terrible time. It makes you think how lucky we are to have the NHS and the incredible individuals within it.
More awareness needs to be raised about group B Strep, it is awful that 1 in 4 women carry it in pregnancy however there is no information given at all during this time.
I’m running the London Marathon in 2025 so we can give something back and hopefully support other families who aren’t as lucky as we were. I want to raise awareness to stop it taking too many precious newborns too soon. We may have been lucky, however it stole our newborn days with Bowen and instead filled us with dread as there is a chance of reoccurrence of group B Strep infection up to 3 months old.”