New to site . . . VRE infection after LAR

[jep]

Hello. My husband had surgery 3 weeks ago to remove a tumor from his sigmoid. There was some spreading to nearby lymph nodes, and 1 regional lymph node. Surgeon is very confident that he got everything out. After 16 days in the hospital, he finally came home for a week, but is back in the hospital with a "super bug" VRE infection. He looks good and feels good, but this infection is freaking me out. He just wants to start chemo and we have no idea how long it will take to clear this up. Does anyone have any info or experience with VRE infections? They just put him on Linezolid. Reaching out for the first time. Thanks for your help!
jep

[Jacques]

Hello. My husband had surgery 3 weeks ago to remove a tumor from his sigmoid. There was some spreading to nearby lymph nodes, and 1 regional lymph node. Surgeon is very confident that he got everything out. After 16 days in the hospital, he finally came home for a week, but is back in the hospital with a "super bug" VRE infection. He looks good and feels good, but this infection is freaking me out. He just wants to start chemo and we have no idea how long it will take to clear this up. Does anyone have any info or experience with VRE infections? They just put him on Linezolid. Reaching out for the first time. Thanks for your help!
jep

I have not had experience with VRE infections, but I did have experience with another kind of infection that took the doctors over 2 weeks to identify.

Does your doctor know the name of the "super bug" bacteria? In my case they didn't even figure out the name for over 2 weeks, and in the mean time they had been using antibiotics that were no use at all for dealing with that type of bacteria. The first step is to properly identify the bacteria fully, then after this they can start using the correct type of antibiotic.

Here is a document on VRSA. I don't know if it is relevant for your purposes, but you can scan through it to see if there are any similarities to your "super bug".

https://www.cdc.gov/hai/pdfs/VRSA-Investigation-Guide-05_12_2015.pdf

[jep]

Thank you for your response. So my husband's infection is Enterococcus (vancomycin resistant) and the doctor just told us today that it appears to be "colonized," which is good. They seem pretty confident that the antibiotics are doing the job . . . my husband's main concern is another delay in starting his chemo treatments. We know that he has to gain some strength (and be infection free) before starting, but it's already been a month since his surgery. Because of his fistula, they want to have him on TPN for a while to allow it to heal. I guess we just have to be patient and take it one day at a time. Again, thank you for replying!
jep