I’ve been trying to write this post for days now.

I need to write it, get it off my chest.

The bacteria that Immy grew in her chin was Staph.

Not just any staph but the dreaded MRSA.

The doctors suggested it was probably infecting Ivy as well and on Monday her swabs came back positive too.

Now, before you all run screaming from my blog, to scrub yourselves down with Clorhexidine and follow that with a lathering of Bactroban, you should know that 50% of health care workers carry MRSA on their beings and never get sick, in fact, a large portion of the community, carry this flora around with them all the time.

It usually only affects immune compromised people and a very small number of the population, usually people who have been ill or who have had surgery.

So, reading this is not going to make anyone sick

and

we are good, clean people, contrary to what some doctors have suggested.

There are people out there in the blogoshere, who have met us, met our family, know that we don’t live in putrid conditions. They spend time with us and have yet to be infected.

The truth be told, it is probably Ivy and I who are spreading the MRSA around because we have spent so much time in the hospital.

It probably has more to do with the large number of antibiotics Ivy has ingested, had pumped into her ears, had smeared over her body, in her three years of life. I have set her up to be a little incubator of this multi resistent bug.

I don’t know what else to tell you.

My house no longer smells like a home, it smells like a vet’s surgery.

It has been scoured and cleansed and bleached.

All of the toys have been thrown away or washed, the clothes are slowly going through their sixty degree wash cycles.

My body is currently seething from scrubbing it with Hibicleans and following it with a bleach chaser while washing down the shower recess. My skin itches, it is so tight and dry

and yet, I still feel dirty.

I still feel as though I have failed my kids.

All of the children are on antibiotics, essentially (in a strange ironic twist) protecting the public from us and our hitch hiker.

We are not infectious

but it still gave me pause, when I arrived at the preschool, to discover that there was Impetigo going around.

Noah and Ivy have not attended for three weeks, because they’ve been sick but I still stopped dead in my tracks and wondered if we were the family who had started the disease and not that we were one of the unfortunates to pick it up and carry it home.

I have read many, many horror stories over the last few nights about this ‘superbug’ and how hard it is to get rid of.

How it can mame and kill.

Now I feel dirty and scared.

I understand if you all want to run away screaming.

I do.

My stress levels have escalated threefold since Monday,

my self esteem as a good mother, plummeted.

Our penance for trying to do right by Ivy is to be plagued by a bacteria that is smarter than most of the doctors who treat her

and the  ultimate irony is that only five days in hospital on IV antibiotics will give Ivy any chance of beating this.