THE THINGS YOU LEARN!

You hang out in a hospital long enough, you pick up all kinds of interesting stuff. Of course, most times it's stuff you were happier not knowing. For instance, common procedure at St. David's now is to swab every new patient's nose, right off the bat. Why? To check for MRSA, one of those super bugs we created by insisting that our doctors give us antibiotics for every little thing under the sun, whether we really needed them or not!

I've learned a lot about swabs and cultures and bacteria in the last few days. Remember I told you one of Hubby's cultures came back positive for something called gram positive cocci in clusters? From that info they new to start him on an antibiotic called Vancomycin, but that was just the beginning. Apparently gpc can go in a couple of different directions -- strep or staph. After another 24 hrs. or so they were able to tell us that John's was definitely a staff infection -- the kind many people pick up in hospitals and such. They didn't stop there, however. The nurse told us they'd have to let it "cook a while longer", until they knew for sure whether it was MRSA or not. Yikes! I guess the panic showed on my face, because she hurried to assure me that it didn't mean they couldn't knock it out. It just meant they'd have to work a bit harder to do it. She also told us that John's original nose swab they took when he was admitted had come back negative for MRSA, "so that's probably a good sign." I pray she's right! Meanwhile, John just called me a little while ago to tell me they were planning to move him to a different room. I immediately thought "OMG, they're putting him in isolation!", be he said no, they were just moving him out of Intermediary Care and into a regular room, either tonight or tomorrow morning. I'll take that as another good sign!

Not really here nor there, but kind of a funny coincidence, is the fact that our son's hunny bunny has just recently resigned from her position as a chemistry teacher in order to go to grad school. Why? Because she's dying to do research on neat stuff like drug-resistant bacteria!