Operation Disinfection

My house used to be spotless. With each subsequent child I have a little less time to clean which is probably OK because I needed to loosen up on some of my OCD tendencies anyway. It still is fairly clean but certainly not what it was pre-children.

I took the kids to my friend Becky's house to swim and for a cook out on Sunday. I noticed on the way there that Carly's profile looked a little different. I couldn't put my finger on it because it was not anything drastic but I finally figured out that the area between her top lip and her nose was a bit swollen. I asked her if she knew why and she said she had run into her door. We laughed about it. She said she is clumsy and did it and it didn't really hurt so she didn't tell anybody. I felt the place and there was a knot under it that was rock hard. Then as we were swimming I noticed these nasty pustules in her ear. There was a big one that I could see well and then a bunch of smaller ones leading into the ear canal. I began to grow a little more concerned as the lip area began to swell even more.

On the way home I decided I should probably not let it go on. Acute kids and Care Now were already closed so I just took her to the ER and we were taken to the Fast Track. They said it was an ear infection, a sinus infection, and cellulitis. They gave us a boatload of medicine and we were on our way. Carly said her lip did not hurt at all and her ear only hurt a tiny bit. We went to bed and woke up on Monday and her lip looked much worse. I called the pediatrician's office and he said he wanted to see her. He took a look at her and sent us for a CT scan. It showed an abscess at the base of her nose. There was not a sore or anything visible on the outside. There was just the swelling. Our pediatrician talked to the ENT at Cook's who said it had to be drained. We got to Cook's and she ended up having surgery at about 10:00 Monday night. They made a hole up in her gum and one in her nose and drained and cleaned the area and packed it. The packing started in her mouth and came out her nose. We got to her hospital room about midnight. She did great. She slept all night and woke up smiling and denied any pain the whole time. She got several rounds of IV antibiotics and she was discharged yesterday afternoon. We had just enough time to run in Build-A-Bear (which is so strategically placed inside the hospital because who can say "No" to their sick child) before darting off to Southlake to the ENT's office for the packing removal. It was nasty. She tolerated it pretty well, probably better than I would have. We got home finally about 8:00 last night. She woke up looking almost normal this morning. The swelling has gone way down and she is able to eat most things now. She is still on 2 antibiotics (Clindamycin and Bactrim) but at least we can do them at home. She has been a trooper and I am so proud of the way she has handled all of this.

So it turns out that the nastiness in her ear and the abscess were both caused by MRSA. Nice!! So today was spent disinfecting EVERYTHING!! MRSA used to just be seen in hospitals but has become widespread in the community now. I do not know whether to take the blame on this one or not but I guess it really doesn't matter. I know that I am around MRSA all day at work and could have brought it home but I also know that I have been working around it for 8+ years now and this is the first time any of us has had it. So it could have been me or it could have been Wal-Mart or the playground at McDonald's or Chick-fil-A or anywhere else. My house is now the cleanest it has ever been and I think it will be staying this way. My OCD is back in full force. We are also doing an MRSA decolonization on each of us so every night for 7 nights we each, yes all 5 of us, get a Hibiclens bath and then twice a day we get Bactoban in our nose. Day 1 down and only 6 more to go. Oh the excitement...