About two to three hours later things looked a lot more serious to them when her blood results showed her C-reactive protein levels in excess of 700, and we were told this was probably meningitis. Actually it later turned out that Evie had Group A streptococcal septicaemia and not meningitis.
The South Thames Retrieval service were called down from London to collect her and it took them (working with our local hospital team) over four hours to get her stable enough to transport. She was rushed to the Evelina Children’s Hospital intensive care unit where she was on a ventilator and required a lot of blood pressure support for several days, the most terrifying time of our life all in all.
She ballooned up with all the fluids she had so that she was just a swollen little person lying there, nothing like our little girl. Her ongoing IV antibiotics were changed to more targeted antibiotics once the Strep A was identified from her blood after the first 24 hours. She also had steroids and immunoglobulins, blood transfusions and platelet transfusions. Her kidneys started to fail and she was put onto dialysis after eight days in hospital but was lucky to only require that for a few days before her kidneys were able to cope alone again. Her right foot started to discolour over the front third on the first day in intensive care due to the blood supply being compromised. She had some improvement in her foot pulses a few days later but she will still lose a part of her foot and we are still uncertain how much that will be as this problem is ongoing.
She spent ten days in intensive care, a further 11 days in hospital after that, and now (July 2011) just over four weeks since this all began (foot aside) she is home and doing really well.