Mum Kacey told us “It was just another normal day for the family, adjusting to life with our newborn son, Marty. He had been fine all morning, drinking normally and acting like his usual self. We decided to go shopping that day, but as they we were getting ready to leave, Marty seemed very unsettled. We managed to get him to sleep and went about our day, but every little bump that the pram went over would make him scream and cry. I didn’t think anything of it at first, assuming he was constipated due to not having a bowel movement in a few days. The only way to settle him was to hold him.
We managed to settle him off to sleep on his side in his pram, but he would only lay on his right side, which I thought was strange. When we got home, he was due for a bottle, but he didn’t wake up for it.
I had a gut feeling that something was wrong, so I told my partner to go wake him up. When he brought Marty in, my heart completely dropped, and I began to panic. Marty’s skin was really pale and mottled, and he wouldn’t take his bottle. I rang my mum to come over, and as soon as she saw him, she said they needed to go to the hospital immediately.
As we were leaving for the hospital, I noticed plum-coloured blotches forming on his soft spot on his head. When we got to the hospital, Marty looked yellowish, and his heart rate was raised. He was holding his breath a lot. The doctors put him on antibiotics straight away, and while they were checking him over, they pointed out a big swelling on the left side of his neck that was just getting bigger and bigger. They did a CT scan straight away to see what it was, and it came back as fluid from an infection. Luckily for him, the antibiotics began working straight away.
After what felt like a million blood tests, lumbar puncture, and other tests, Marty was two weeks old when he was diagnosed with late-onset group B Strep sepsis. The doctors told us it was only a matter of time, and if we hadn’t taken him to the hospital when we did, the outcome could have been much worse.
Marty spent a total of 10 days in hospital being treated with antibiotics and then finally was discharged.
I count my lucky stars and I’m so thankful my boy got through it and is now happy and healthy. It was the scariest moment of our lives and my partner and I will never get over the mental trauma it has caused us. We won’t ever have another baby because of it, I can still hear the sounds of the machine’s beeping and it haunts me every single day. We will never get over what happened, and I thank God everyday.”
