I've been sick and have been deleting a lot of e-mails but I noticed a post today about GBS and I suspect perhaps the thread is regarding testing mum and/or a new-born for GBS? As a mother of a baby who had to be airlifted out of town, on a ventilator of 70% oxygen and told my baby might not make it through the night, GET TESTED! I wasn't going to have any routine testing done during my pregnancy because I wanted to keep it as natural as possible. When my OB found out the hospital would automatically give me an IV (something I wanted to avoid) during labour if they didn't know my GBS status, we decided to have that test done thinking that we could report a negative result to the hospital and avoid the IV. [I was 38 weeks pregnant at the time of the swab]. I gave birth the following week and did have one round of antibiotics in my IV but it wasn't enough to protect my baby who had already contracted the infection. He wasn't breathing, and he had pneumonia. We spent 10 days in an out of town NICU, five of those days he was on a ventilator so I had to pump before I ever got to breast feed. I can't help but wonder if I'd had the GBS swab done earlier (I think around 30 - 32 weeks is when it's normally done?) and taken antibiotics during the pregnancy, perhaps my son would've been ok when he was born. I am very lucky that my son didn't contract meningitis or something more serious. He's perfectly healthy now but it sure was a scary start to our lives and stressful for me to have to drive 3 hours out of town and stay in a hotel 8 hours after giving birth. Margo Wife to Robert Mummy to Liam *********************************************** The LACTNET mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned LISTSERV(R) list management software together with L-Soft's LSMTP(TM) mailer for lightning fast mail delivery. For more information, go to: http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html