Her son had been sick for four months when Blanca Morales started asking about a transplant. It had started with a case of strep throat from Mundo’s first-grade class — routine enough, treatable with antibiotics. Then he started having stomach trouble. Mundo was the youngest of five. Morales had been a mom a long time. She wasn’t fazed by a little vomiting. She kept pails from Halloween and Easter by her kids’ beds, just in case. This was routine until it wasn’t. Morales sat on the floor by the toilet pinning back Mundo’s hair, catching his throw-up in a bucket, wiping his tears. They wound up at the ER.
Morales had never heard of Clostridioides difficile when they got the diagnosis. By the third relapse, she could identify the infection by its smell. It was both acrid and sweet at once, somewhere between burnt plastic and rotting flower, the smell of hospital. The illness had likely been sparked by strep-fighting antibiotics back in March 2025, the bacterial community of Mundo’s colon wiped out, allowing the heartier, toxin-spewing C. diff to proliferate — a microscopic strongman taking advantage of a microbial power vacuum.
