Quinn Reecer’s story
Elise shares her son’s terrifying battle with meningitis after a mild fever – and how early treatment led to a full recovery.
It was just after my little Ginger Nut’s first birthday when he became ill.
There were no startling symptoms; he was just a little restless, cried more than usual, ran a temperature and then was back to normal.
I felt something was wrong
We were staying with my in-laws and most of the family thought he was probably teething. I agreed but, I can’t put my finger on why, I just wasn’t happy with him at all. I insisted on taking him to an out-of-hours doctor (ruining a planned family day). The doctor thought he was teething too, so we stayed for another night with Django clearly unhappy.
We left for home (London at the time) on the Sunday and had another disturbed night. I felt something was wrong and I took him to my GP. She couldn’t see much wrong with him but as I was so concerned she said we would go for a precautionary blood test at our local hospital. God bless her.
When the blood test result was given to me by two paramedics, who ushered me straight to a waiting ambulance and blue lighted us to St Marys, Paddington, I knew something was badly wrong. Django had meningitis.
He spent two days in isolation with me in a comatose state and then – despite all my worst fears – bravely fought it off.
He is now a gorgeous 14-year-old with just some minor hearing loss to show for the experience.
Parents – follow your instinct! St Mary's tell me that they would rather see over-zealous parents any day than have to deal with fully developed meningitis, when it is often too late.
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