Our family wants to do all we can to stop another family from having to go through the heartache and pain we have, and the pain we live with each day without Livia here with us.
On 15th June 2022, Livia felt unwell and was sent home from work. She complained of a bad headache and she took a couple of paracetamols and went to bed. Devastatingly, she never woke up again. Sadly it took sixteen weeks after the initial cause of death was declared unknown, to perform hundreds of tests before meningitis was found to be the cause.
Liv’s Aunty Andrea has met with the Meningitis Research Foundation to discuss their plans for raising awareness in Liv’s age group and what we can also do to help. In particular, raising awareness of the disease at festivals. Liv absolutely loved going to festivals and had spent the weekend at one days before she was taken from us.
Meningitis does affect all ages but for us, our aim is to raise awareness with Liv’s age group, as we weren’t aware of the higher risk to Liv, and it’s hard not to blame ourselves as we do think if we were aware Livia could still be here with us living her life to the full as she did.
Livia was an outgoing nineteen-year-old, who loved socialising, going clubbing, going to festivals, and going on holidays. She had not decided what to do in life but we remember saying there was no need to rush but never knew what was to happen. She studied dance at York College, she expressed an interest in being an air hostess, and she was working at Lucia’s restaurant but she was taken from us too soon.
To find out there was a vaccine for meningitis B that is sadly only available privately is devastating. If we were aware of this we would have definitely paid for Livia to be vaccinated, and as Liv’s Grandad said it would have been the best money we had ever spent. We will work in Livia’s memory to raise awareness of meningitis and the existence of the privately available meningitis B vaccine.
Alison & Matt (Livia’s mum and dad)