Claire Byrne's story
Broadcaster and journalist Claire shares her experience with bacterial meningitis as a teenager.
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.
Working to raise awareness
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.
