Marciano Nolan's story

On 2 January 2013 Maz fell ill, he was having problems for a while with other issues, so we thought it was a normal bug that was going around. He was complaining of headaches and pain in his back.

On 3 January he said he had hurt his right arm which had swollen and we thought he had broken it. It was very painful and I said to him he needed to go to hospital to check it out.

On 4 January Maz was then complaining of pain in both arms and feet and he couldn’t get dressed or do basic day to day things. My friend took him to the accident and emergency department who sent him away as he wasn’t an emergency and sent him to see the out of hours’ doctor. The doctor said he has swollen joints and took bloods. He was then sent home with very strong pain killers at around 11:45am.  He sat with me for a bit and then went to bed and within an hour I went to see him to see if he wanted any food or drink. At that time he had a headache and did not like the light and was in darkness in the room.

At 8:30pm I went to see him, I had been up and down the stairs all day every half an hour and was taking care of my 11 year old, seven year old and seven month old children. I called the out of hours’ doctor and they said they couldn’t get a GP out till Midnight. Within an hour I went back up to see him and when he looked at me his eyes stared and his pupils were moving left to right very quickly.  I phoned for an ambulance and when they came I told them the symptoms and when they went to do his observations, he was very confused dehydrated and still vomiting and had a temperature of 39.9 so the paramedics took him.

At 11pm I rang the hospital to see how he was and they told me to ring in a couple of hours as he was still waiting to be seen. At 1am I rang the hospital and they said he had a nasty infection I said I would ring in a couple of hours.

I went up to accident and emergency and within 10 minutes I saw Maz rushed in for a CT scan and then doctors came to get me and said he was in ITU.

They tried so hard to save him but it was too aggressive and sadly I was told he had died on Sunday 6 January at 11:30am of meningococcal meningitis and septicaemia and brain stem cell damage.

Clare Streeter
February 2013