If I remember correctly, getBody returns the json string itself. Well more specifically it returns the exact response back. But in your case that's a json string. So you need to decode that:
$body = json_decode($response->getBody(),true);
now $body should be an array, so you should be able to access status from it, you can run dd on it to see the results. It's possible you need to run ->getContents() on the getBody response as well.
@grenadecx Yes it does return the JSON response but I wasn't converting it into an associative array which was resulting in the error I mentioned :) Thanks a bunch :)