Eliana Shaw-Lothian's story

During my first year at university I was living in student accommodation and one day in October I felt unwell. I had an intense headache since the morning, but I didn't think anything of it as I used to get them every day. 

I slept throughout the entire day and by evening, although the headache had gone, I was very shaky and dizzy whenever I stood up, as well as feeling faint. I also had really cold feet and hands. I called my mum to tell her I wasn't feeling well, and she asked if I could see a rash anywhere on my body, a common symptom of meningitis. But I couldn't see any rash. I told her it was probably just the bad headache affecting me, and I was going to sleep. However, later that night, I started severely throwing up, as well as having difficulty moving due to stiff muscles and joints in my neck, arms, and legs. At some points, it felt like I was paralysed. After being sick many more times, I knew something was seriously wrong and I searched for the symptoms of meningitis. My last memory was thinking I needed to go to the hospital. My next memory was waking up in the hospital three days later. 

My parents had grown worried after not hearing from me the following morning and had incessantly called my phone from 11 am that day. One of my flatmates, who knew I wasn't feeling well from the night before, heard my phone in my room around 1:30 pm that afternoon. He thought something wasn't right so went in to check on me. He found me completely delirious in my bedroom and told my parents who immediately jumped in the car to come to my university. They were in contact with campus security as an ambulance would have taken at least two hours to get to me. Campus Security took me to the hospital around 4 pm and my parents arrived slightly later.

I was in a very delirious state in A&E and my lips had started to turn blue. By this point, spots and a rash had started to appear, and I deteriorated rapidly. It was very hard for the doctors to examine me and get an IV into me as I was hallucinating. I was sent to ICU with suspected meningitis. 

In ICU it took time to put me in an isolation ward. The full emergency team of doctors and nurses worked on me. They decided to pump me with three different paths of treatment as they didn't at this stage know what I had and did not want to wait for results to come back. By 8:30 they were treating me for bacterial and viral meningitis, as well as sepsis. 

They had to sedate me as I was in a heightened state of paranoia and they wanted to do an MRI to look for fluid on my brain. They told my parents that I was in an induced coma with suspected meningitis and that they were relieved they had given me medication three hours ago rather than waiting for an MRI. They stopped the other two forms of medication, concentrating on bacterial meningitis, but they wouldn't know the strain and be 100% certain until the cultures returned. The doctors said I was very sick and the next few hours were critical to see if I would respond to the treatment. Their words were 'She is in acute danger'. 

I was on a ventilator and a feeding tube, and it wasn't until Sunday evening that I started to show signs of fighting the infection., A decision was made to bring me out of the induced coma at about 1 pm on Monday.

Waking up was terrifying as at first I didn't recognise my parents or know who I was. Being told that I had bacterial meningitis and could have died was a feeling that I will never forget. I also struggled with the realisation that I could have had permanent hearing loss as I couldn't hear properly at the beginning of my recovery (luckily it has nearly returned to normal). I had lost my motor movements, so eating and walking was a struggle to begin with, and as a dancer, that was very hard for me to come to terms with. It has been a struggle mentally to get back on my feet and recover from this illness as well as process what I went through - something that I am still coming to terms with - but despite still having fluid around my heart as well as concentration problems, I have fully resumed university life as much as possible. I am on the dance squad team for my university and have competed in many competitions since the following March. 

I hope that my story helps people who are recovering from meningitis, as I understand how mentally draining and hard it can be when you're in that recovery process, and you want to 'get back to normal' and do things you used to do as soon as possible. I hope to help the Meningitis Research Foundation raise awareness, as I feel it is an illness that not many people fully understand unless they or someone they know has been affected - I certainly didn't know anything about it previously. 

Understanding the signs and symptoms could potentially be lifesaving, especially in the context of university life in student accommodation, where you might not know the people you are sharing with. Spreading awareness amongst students is something that I hope to achieve In the future.