Lisa Shoko's story

I was eighteen years old, a student athlete and a law student, and I thought I knew my body well enough to explain away what was happening to me.

 

The symptoms I dismissed as nothing serious

The headache came first. Then the sensitivity to light, the stiff neck, the fever, the deep ache in my muscles. I had migraines, I always had. I trained hard. Soreness was familiar, something to push through. I told myself I needed to sleep it off. I took a nap, and when I got up to walk to the bathroom, my body gave out beneath me.

I collapsed against the radiator. It was the middle of winter and the heat was scorching, but I was unconscious, so I didn’t feel it. I lay on the bathroom floor for hours before a housemate found me. By the time I arrived at hospital, I was unconscious, violent, confused. There was nothing visible to indicate what was wrong. No textbook rash. No obvious signs. It took more than eight hours to diagnose me.

I was later told it was an international doctor who recognised something in the presentation and suggested a lumbar puncture – a spinal tap. That decision saved my life. The result confirmed meningitis B. By then, I had been in the intensive care unit (ICU) for days.

The infection had caused fluid to accumulate around my heart. My blood pressure was dangerously low. My clotting was compromised. I had also sustained third and fourth degree burns to my left hand from the radiator – burns severe enough to require specialist treatment, a procedure I apparently fought against with considerable force.

I have no memory of any of it.

 

Waking up in intensive care

I spent over a week in ICU. My mother drove six hours through the night to reach me because I was too unstable to be transferred. I woke up not knowing where I was, not understanding why she was there, not yet knowing how serious it had been.

She set up scrabble on my bedside table. She read me Little Miss and Mr Men which I found comforting and brought me some laughter as she performed the voices. She made the room feel like somewhere a person could survive.

And I did survive. But survival, I would learn, is only the beginning.

Life after meningitis

Meningitis B took things from me that don’t show up on a scan. I failed my first year of law. Not because I stopped caring – but because my brain, quite literally, could not hold information anymore. Brain fog. Short and long term memory loss. Concentration that collapsed under any sustained effort. There are whole years of my life, friendships, experiences, that exist now only as gaps. I reach for them and find nothing.

I became quieter. More reclusive. My friends continued forward – more energy, more momentum, more life – and I had to stay back. I was too consumed with surviving each day, with making sense of what had happened to my body and my mind, to tend to those friendships properly. The distance grew quietly. And I let it, because I didn’t have the capacity for anything else.

I carried shame for a long time. Shame about failing. About being slower, more forgetful, less capable than I used to be. Guilt for not being who I was before. An apology dressed up as a person. I’ve moved on from that. But I name it, because it was real, and because I know I’m not the only one who felt it.

 

Getting back to myself

In 2018, four years after the hospital, I was in my final year of university – on track to graduate with a 2:1 in Law. The degree I had failed out of. The one I had come back to.

That year, I climbed Kilimanjaro for Meningitis Research Foundation, supported by friends, family, Orbis Investment and Margate Rotary Club. I stood above the clouds and for the first time I felt my body was something to be grateful for rather than something to grieve. It wasn’t an ending. It was the first moment I understood that there were still things ahead of me I hadn’t imagined yet.

Meningitis Research Foundation exists to eradicate meningitis by 2030. There are vaccines. There are treatments. This disease does not have to keep taking people – not their lives, not their years, not the versions of themselves they were before. That mission matters to me in a way that is difficult to put into words.

 

What I carry forward

The scar on my left hand is still there. Visible, permanent, mine. I used to look at it and feel the weight of everything it represented. Now I understand it differently. Scars are evidence that wounds heal – physical ones and emotional ones both. They are proof that something happened which should have ended you. And didn’t.

If you are reading this and something feels wrong – a headache that is different, a neck that won’t move freely, a fever alongside confusion – please do not explain it away. I almost died because the signs were easy to dismiss. Know them. Act on them. Trust the instinct that says this is not normal. It may be the most important thing you ever do.

 

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