About Dr. Frederick Blount Expertise Pediatrician, retired. I trained at Childrens Hospital of Philadelphia some years ago and I did private practice here in Winston-Salem for 30 years until I went full time to the Wake Forest Medical School until retirement.
Question My sister recently had a baby girl June 30th and the baby has been a patient since she was born. They stated that she had an infection due to the mother fever during birth and that she would have to be treated with antibiotic for seven day. Today she will be discharged from the hospital but her mother received a call from the the attending nurse who explain to her that her baby has a heart murmur. When the baby was born she asked the doctor's was the baby healthy and they told her yes that her baby was healthy. My question is shouldn't the doctors detected this murmur sooner and could the antibiotics have something to do with this heart murmur?
Answer When a baby is born all sorts of changes are occurring in the blood vessels; blood doesn't go through the lungs while the baby is the uterus but suddenly it has to after birth. A murmur is a noise made from any fluid running through a pipe or blood vessel. When you flush a toilet there are all sorts of murmurs heard in the floor below. Murmurs come and go right after birth and if this is the most common type it is not abnormal, and in time it will go away, not because something has healed but because normal pressure relationships in the heart have changed. This has absolutly nothing to do with antibiotics. Murmur is a scare word to many parents and I think it most inappropriate for a nurse to tell anyone. If the parent needs to know the doctor should be the one to tell since he/she can explain the situation better. My guess is that this will turn out to be an innocent "noise" and that it will not amount to anything. Tell your sister to talk to the doctor and not the nurse.
