Noah’s mum Alex writes,
“I read the story of Kate Rodgers’ baby Frank who contracted group B Strep meningitis, when I was pregnant with Noah, and ordered the private ECM test straight away. However, I went into labour at 34 weeks with it sat in the drawer at home. I was in labour for three days and group B Strep didn’t cross my mind in those three days TBH. We spent five days in Brighton’s amazing neo-natal unit and were then allowed to take him home.
We were on a strict two-hourly or demand feeding plan because he was premature and slow to gain weight. By week four, part of our routine was me going to bed at 9 pm after a breastfeed and my husband giving him his 11 pm expressed bottle, then bringing him up to bed and me giving him his 1 am feed.
When he was almost six weeks old I woke up to my 1 am alarm and woke Noah up for his feed, but he was sleepy and didn’t really want it. I thought that maybe my husband had given him extra milk at 11 pm and put him back to bed and set my alarm for 3 am expecting to be woken up before then by a hungry baby.
At 3 am’s alarm I woke him up and he had a small feed but again didn’t want a lot but he was alert. This routine carried on till his 9 am feed when I started to worry, so I called my health visitor. They said they didn’t have anyone to come out to see us, but it sounded like he was catching up on sleep and not to worry. I then called the GP who were closing at midday for training, and didn’t have any morning appointments to call the Health Visitor back. A good friend was coming to visit me that morning who saw my concern and took us down to the children’s A&E.
Noah was alert during the 15 minute car journey and we were shown into the newborn room waiting to be checked in. The nurse called us in and when she lifted him out of his car seat she said he felt a bit cold and then he started to be floppy. They whisked him into a main room and then everything went very quickly downhill. They put him on a panda cart with a heated mat, on an antibiotic drip and said they needed to sedate him.
A couple of hours later they moved us up to the high dependency unit as being sedated he needed 1:1 nurse care and from there they said we needed to be transferred up to a London hospital for specialist care. We were blue lighted up to St George’s and he went into the children’s Intensive Care Unit. We spent three days with him sedated and various tests before they said that he had meningitis and it was most likely caused by late-onset GBS infection.
On day four they woke him up and we were able to see his eyes finally, but still weren’t allowed to hold him. I was expressing so he could have milk feeds through a tube. On day six we were transferred back down to Brighton Children’s hospital where we spent the next eight days finishing his round of antibiotics.
Our care was outstanding the whole time and one of our consultants said that there are a lot of symptoms of meningitis other than the well-known rash.
Noah had check-ups until he was a year old and extra hearing tests, but he is now a feisty almost five-year-old who has just finished his first year at school.
When I had my daughter, I had antibiotics during labour to help stop GBS being passed to her and causing a possible infection. I stayed in for 24 hrs so she could be monitored. I have had friends being given the wrong information by midwives which is so frustrating, and I hope that we will catch up with other western countries and test for GBS routinely. But until then I will continue telling everyone I know about GBS and how easy the test is to do.“
