Eye Cultures

We don't do them routinely, but if a kid's eye is gunky we'll culture it. You get some naaasty stuff growing in eyes.

On an even grosser note, today I had a 2 day old baby whose right eye was stuck closed with vernix! :barf01:She'd gone straight from the DR to the OR for a gastroschisis repair, so she never got a bath or anything. I really hate combing days old blood and dried vernix out of a baby's hair. Hate it a lot.

We only swab their eyes if we notice gross stuff accumulating in there. Often times we'll swab their eye, then wait till we see one of the docs to get the order to send it down. We had a run of nasty stuff growing back from a bunch of babies a while back. We changed some things around on the unit and the incidence of eye infections has gone back down.

Only if it's persistently and significantly gunky. And not seemingly related to a recent eye exam. (which only sort of makes sense...). It can be tough to talk our practitioners into culturing sometimes, but when we do there always is something growing. Go figure.

Specifically speaking to transfers--we only really ever get them from within our own hospital or outlying delivery rooms. So we don't do routine cultures on transfers.