Aaron's Worst Fear

Aaron's a lab guy. He knows a lot about bacteria--sometimes too much about bacteria. And some of you know that it makes him a bit bacteriaphobic. Especially of one superbug, Methicillin Resistant Staff Aureus, MRSA. If one of the kids starts playing with his badge from work, "Aah, no, that has MRSA on it." When he'd come to Dexter's NICU spot straight from work, he wouldn't hold him for fear his shirt had MRSA on it. If you drop something on the floor, "Ew, throw it away, it has MRSA on it." You get the idea. And yesterday, when Dexter was admitted, they did the standard test for MRSA and it came back positive. So they retested, and it confirmed Aaron's worst fear. Dexter has MRSA. But they don't think he's necessarily infected with it, he just has it. Hmmm. I don't quite get it either.

Another thing that has everyone confused is Dexter's Sodium levels. When they ran all the initial tests in the ER yesterday, his Sodium levels came back dangerously low. Yep, he was hyponatrimic. They said that could be an explanation for the onset of seizures and the unresponsive behavior. They gave him a load of Sodium via an IV, and by last night, the levels were back to normal. But as they've run through the list of all the things that might make Na drop so drastically, none of them seem to fit. He hasn't gotten significant amounts of free water, he doesn't fit the picture of cerebral salt wasting, his thyroid tests were normal so they don't think it was an ADH imbalance. Essentially, they said they have no idea. And even weirder, they said he returned to normal levels from extremely low levels with hardly any intervention from them. They didn't quite understand how he could have corrected so quickly. But Aaron, the lab guy, has despised the chemistry analyzer in the lab since they got the new machine upon moving to the new hospital over a year ago. That Cobas 6000 (that's the name of the machine) was always giving wacky Sodiums; I remember him ranting and raving about it and getting home late because he was retesting every Sodium back when he was s full-time lab guy. Last night when they had to repoke Dexter about 7 times to retest the Sodium because the numbers were a bit wacky, Aaron declared that his rage against the Cobas was now "getting personal!!" Again, it seems that Aaron knows a bit too much for his own good.