Rhiannon, mum to Elsie, says
“Elsie was born back in August 2020 at 27+6 weeks. She spent 65 days in NICU (Neonatal Intensive Care Unit) due to her prematurity before finally being able to come home.
We had a lovely week at home introducing her to family and her big brother who met her for the first time due to covid restrictions in NICU.
When Elsie was 10 weeks old, I noticed she had slept for a long time and not fed for a couple of hours. I decided after four hours of not waking, I would wake her for a feed. When I picked her up, she was floppy like a rag doll. I immediately called for an ambulance. She was admitted to the children’s ward where they started antibiotics and noticed her breathing was stopping occasionally (apnoeas).
As the night went on, Elsie was going downhill rapidly. Her apnoeas were becoming very regular and she was needing intervention to help her breathe. The medical team decided she needed to be intubated and transferred to a Paediatric Intensive Care Unit at a hospital about an hour away. We had no answers for the next two days while she was intubated. When they got her results back, they were showing late-onset group B Strep sepsis and meningitis. They decided she needed three weeks of antibiotics, which had to be administered in hospital.
We had some horrendous conversations by her bedside with the doctors who didn’t know if the meningitis had affected her brain and it was a case of seeing how things go as she develops. Thankfully, she’s now nearly three years old and, although she is still waiting for another hearing test to rule out mild hearing loss, she’s showing no other long-term effects.”
