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Originally Posted by sandy81  i have mrsa how will this effect my up coming csection |
Hi Sandy!
First of all congratulations on having a baby. You must be so excited!
So about MRSA, if you have a chance, read the thread I wrote (which is the first thread titled "MRSA explained"). There is nothing magical about MRSA. It is simply a bacterium which lives on the surface of your skin and it happens to be resistant to a certain type of penicillin which is normally used to treat this bug (called Staphylococcus aureus). Many people have MRSA or MSSA (methicillin susceptible Staph aureus) living on their skin and it is not a big deal. You live, it lives, and it doesn't pose any problems. It is only when MRSA gets in to deeper layers of the skin where it can cause infections and boils and things like that. But just so you know, MSSA can cause the EXACT same thing! People are so scared of MRSA because of the way the media portrays it.
If you are completely asymptomatic (i.e. you don't have a whole bunch of boils on your body and what not) there won't really be all that much difference when you go for your C-section. The doctors will probably give you a dose of vancomycin rather than penicillin just before they are about to do the procedure. They will also do the procedure in a sterile fashion so that any bacteria living on the skin won't get in to the deeper layers when they cut. But again, this is no different than if you did NOT have MRSA because in the absence of MRSA, there are still TONS and TONS and TONS of bacteria living on your skin.
I think it's bad how there is this stigma being set up with being MRSA+ almost, in some people's heads, being equated to something like being HIV+! Staph aureus is a bacteria which has been living on skin for as long as humans have been around. It's just that doctors like to identify when the Staph aureus is methicillin resistant because it makes a small difference clinically in which antibiotics you can use to treat it.
