A mother has urged pregnant women to keep their babies safe and ask their doctors about Group B Strep after her baby boy died from GBS infection at only three days old.
Mikhailla Glossat, 22, from Darwin felt so blessed when her third pregnancy went smoothly after two miscarriages last year.
She and her fiance, Teddy Fitzgerald, 30, fell pregnant for the first time at the beginning of 2016, but experienced the pain of a missed miscarriage in March at 12 weeks gestation and then an early miscarriage again in May of the same year.
“At first I didn’t register that I was pregnant. I didn’t get any symptoms until about ten weeks,” Mikhailla told Kidspot, adding that everything seemed to be going so well throughout the entire pregnancy.
She went into labour at 38 weeks and five days. She laboured at home for approximately ten hours then went to the hospital when the time came.
She and her fiance arrived at hospital around 11am and they welcomed their baby boy, Foxx into the world at around 6pm. She said that the staff had to resuscitate her baby at first, but then he was crying, yet she said she didn’t think anything of it.
After breastfeeding, she noticed that Foxx coughed a few times, but the midwives assured her that it was normal for newborns to sometimes bring up some mucous. Five hours after his birth, Foxx started coughing again. “At first he was coughing up mucous but then there was blood with the mucous,” Mikhailla said.
When the paediatrician checked Foxx, he was instantly diagnosed with Group B Strep infection. He was transferred to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit where he was given antibiotics, but despite fighting as hard as he could, he passed away on March 29th at just three days old.
GBS is a common organism that lives in the gut, bladder and vagina. It can cause complications for newborns, which include bacterial infection of the bloodstream (septicaemia), pneumonia and meningitis.
According to Better Health, it is estimated that 12 to 15 percent of Australian pregnant women are carriers, however, in most cases, it is asymptomatic. Only one to four out of every 1000 newborns will contract GBS from their mothers during birth.
Most women are given a swab test in their third trimester, and if it comes back positive, they are given an antibiotic drip during labour to prevent the transmission from mother to baby.
In Mikhailla’s case, swabs taken at 37 weeks returned a negative result despite the new mother being told that Foxx was “highly infected” prior to his birth.
Now, Mikhailla decided to share her story to raise awareness for this seemingly common ailment.
“May we always remember Foxx, and may there be more awareness about GBS during pregnancy, labour and post birth,” she posted to Facebook earlier this week.
Source: Kidspot.com.au
