Her face said it before her words did. “We suspect your daughter has meningococcal meningitis. The next 72 hours are critical. If she makes it through the next 72 hours, she has a 10% chance of survival.”
It took less than ten minutes to go from waking up my lethargic teenage daughter for class and seeing her bloodshot, black eyes. By divine intervention, I lifted her shirt to see her body covered in spots. Ten minutes later, I was screaming to my husband to get into the car. It took four minutes to race her to the hospital. A car ride that now feels like instinct had its foot on the accelerator.
Arriving at the emergency room (ER) with such urgency that the energy needed no sirens. The ER nurse came running out. I couldn’t speak. I lifted my daughter’s shirt. I’ll never forget the look on her face. My panic shifted to her. She took it and turned it into proficiency. She knew. She shouted lifesaving orders: “Isolate! Side entrance! Antibiotic drip! CDC! Now!” And there we stood. Suspended in time between the last ten minutes and the seventy-two hours that lay before us.
No! This cannot be. We were at our church bazaar twelve hours ago. She was healthy. Vibrant. No! This cannot be. This is just one too many cocktails. Yet now they were handing me numbers like they were facts and not heartbreak.
72 hours is what they gave us. 72 hours to wait and pray and wonder if ten per cent was enough for God to work with. How do you measure 72 hours when time no longer exists? Ten per cent! All I could do was pray through clenched teeth and dare God to prove them wrong.
Sepsis had set in. She had no idea what was happening to her. She was wheeled away from us. They called it isolation. To me, it felt like exile.
The magnitude of what was happening was about to hit me. Contact tracing. Family and friends were notified to get antibiotics. Everyone she had been in contact with had to be informed. Our two younger children had to be brought in. The entire church community and their loved ones. The college she attended had to be closed, and every student had to be tested. My daughter, patient zero. The fragile, unwilling epicentre of a thousand unfolding fears.
And then, the formalities were covered and here we were. Adrift in the intensive care unit (ICU) waiting room. Unsure if life still clung to our child. Time revealed its cruelty. Mocking us with its silence. Waiting. Helpless.
After what felt like a lifetime, carved out of a single breath, the physician came. His words did not carry any answers. She spoke of a world that belonged to others. Names printed in newspapers. To families you pass in hospital corridors, their faces etched with a worry you cannot fathom.
We have become the story I had once thought only existed in the lives of strangers.
He did not speak of certainties. Only ifs. If we had hesitated. If we had waited an hour longer. If the ER nurse had missed the signs. Each if unfurled like a shadowed path leading toward a world we could not bear to imagine.
He had a calmness about him, but his eyes carried the weight of truths. As he spoke, I understood how thin the thread was keeping her here. How fragile the divide between life and absence.
Tonight, the ICU waiting room will be our home. Built on our trembling prayers. Doctors step in, step out, their voices stitched with caution. Their words held taut between hope and warning. Exhaustion sets in, but we dare not close our eyes.
Morning dawned, and with it came the CDC chief, bearing the first words of relief. Her fever had broken. A fragile promise that God was listening.
By 12 pm, we were allowed to see her through the glass. The corridor smelled of bleach and fear. I stood at the glass, my reflection merging with hers. I count every breath she takes as if my gaze alone can tether her to this world. A world she was oblivious to. A small mercy. Nurses moved around her with a choreography too swift for me to follow. A constellation of wires and monitors tracing her every breath. We just stood there. Watching. Praying. Locked out of her fight.
The doctors work around the clock. No breaks. No hesitation. Just relentless effort to save her. The room pulses with energy. They speak of antibiotics, bloods. Of the things I cannot see but feel pressing against me. Invisible. Merciless. Words like sepsis and organ failure hover in the room. Refusing to leave. Words that had meant nothing to me just yesterday, now lodged in my memory. Circling the edge of our hope.
The hours had arrived in a blur of speed. Paper bracelets, bright lights, beeping machines, snap of gloves, the metallic scent of antiseptic. All colliding into one relentless rhythm. Act – before the disease can outrun us.
Hour 72. The line drawn by doctors. The marker of survival or surrender. We are allowed in her room now. Tears flood the space. Tears of relief, hope, desperation. I held her hand as if I let go, she’d slip through my fingers into whatever place God hides the ones we beg to keep.
Whatever comes next, recovery, scars or struggle, we have reached this hour together. Time is no longer measured by the clock but by the thrum of heartbeats refusing to die. We were living inside the 10% now.
She was so weak and fragile. When her father stepped out of the room, she turned to me with heavy eyes. Her voice was barely a whisper. “Mom, I can’t anymore. I’m too tired. I can’t.”
Those words pierced me deeper than anything I had ever felt. I took her fragile face in my hands, kissed her forehead and, steadying my voice, commanded her to fight. Fight with every fibre of her being. She slept for hours after that.
How does a parent put this into words? How do I use mere pen and paper to describe raw, unfiltered desperation?
Each day, the bloodwork whispered a softer number, proof that the infection was slowly loosening its hold. Yet her body, weary from days of stillness, resisted her. Muscles that once carried her with ease now felt like anchors — heavy and unyielding.
The physiotherapist, voice steady and full of faith, reminded her that even the smallest movement mattered. Each lift of her hand or twitch of her finger was a quiet victory. And although she could not walk, each gesture was a step towards herself again.
Every hour on the hour, Pathcare arrived to draw more blood, leaving her arms bruised and tender. Her veins lay flat, hiding from the endless intrusion of needles, until even the head of pathology was called in search of a way.
And still, after all of that, after the sting and the tears, the physiotherapist would come and gently coax her out of bed. She was so weak from septicaemia that even holding her own head up was an impossible task.
Most days after physio, I would settle her back into bed. I learned how to reconnect the monitors, how to make sure the IV lines were right, and how to smooth the blanket over her fragile frame. And when, finally, she surrendered to exhaustion, I would slip quietly from the ICU. Only then would I let myself break. I would cry until there were no more tears, until the storm inside me stilled.
Every day that passed without the surgeons needing to amputate a limb felt like a gift. Another day, she was allowed to fight this bacterium that had waged the worst kind of havoc inside her body. The damage was relentless, cruel, and yet she still held on.
She cried each time the physio entered the room — tears of fear and exhaustion. But she never refused. She did every movement asked of her, no matter how small, no matter how much it hurt. Just a little more than yesterday was all we needed. She has the heart of a lion, I thought to myself, surprising the medical team and Science Daily.
By the sixth day in the ICU, she was strong enough for the doctors to attempt CT and MRI scans to peer into the hidden landscape of her brain. We braced ourselves for what they might find. Much to our relief, the swelling had eased. But every triumph was laced with suffering. The scans also revealed she had had a stroke.
With wounded hearing and a smile tilted by paralysis on her left side, she kept going. We held that news like stones in our hands — not enough to crush us but heavy enough to weigh down our hearts.
By day seven, the sepsis had started to retreat. The infection was loosening its grip. That day, she would move to the neuro ward. The doctors were pleased; the air I breathed was still thick with worry.
She was no longer tethered to oxygen, though the IV lines still fed her antibiotics like lifeblood. Her appetite had vanished, so we kept feeding her grandpa’s broth, spoon by spoon, every ten minutes, as if coaxing life back into her.
Then, one day, she whispered she was hungry. Just one word was enough to let us breathe again. I exhaled for the first time.
That night, though, my own body betrayed me. A sudden heat rushed from my feet to my head and the world went black. My husband caught me before my head hit the floor and rushed me to the ER, just metres away from where our daughter lay. For a moment, the doctors thought I had had a heart attack. I think it was my body’s way of telling me to breathe when my spirit refused.
Tests were done on Mirske’s heart, too, to rule out any more hidden scars. The doctors found a tiny leak in her mitral valve — something they told us not to fear. Still, worry lodged inside me. Another stone on the growing mountain I carry.
And then came the first true miracle we could hold in our hands. On my birthday, 20 May 2024, we were told she could come home. After fourteen days, we were finally outside the ten per cent. After hours that nearly broke us, she was alive, whole and walking out with us. It was the most blessed birthday I’ll ever know.
Bringing her home felt like carrying a flame out of the storm, shielding it with both hands, terrified of the wind. Her body was fragile, her immune system in tatters. We built a cocoon around her. No visitors, no noise, just love stitched into every hour. Each day she breathed a little deeper, moved a little freer. Physiotherapy became our liturgy, her lungs our altar of hope.
At six weeks, we sat before the physician again. We spoke about her heart. That tiny leak, he assured us, was nothing to fear. My instinct whispered otherwise. We sought a second opinion. Eight weeks later, she was diagnosed with post-meningitis rheumatic heart disease.
Again, we were in a world that belonged to others — these things we read in headlines that happen to other people. Not us.
Her valve was crying out, from minor to critical, in a few weeks. Her mitral valve had betrayed her. They said it resembled scars left by rheumatic fever, though, to our knowledge, she had never had that childhood sickness. It was as though meningitis had unearthed a hidden curse — one we never knew had been planted.
“So how do we proceed now?”
“Nothing but penicillin to prevent any streptococcal infection and check again in six months’ time,” they said.
Here came that instinct again. No. I need another opinion. And so we met Dr Suzette Fourie at Christiaan Barnard Hospital. The tests came like waves: CT scans, MRIs, cardiac MRI, brain scans and blood tests. They spoke of clots forming in her heart — silent and merciless. To find the cause, they planned an angio bubble test. I froze at the thought. Air bubbles — the very thing every parent is warned of, sent deliberately to her heart.
For three days, we watched the clock, waiting for the angiogram to be done; blood thinners coursed through her. We padded life, afraid the world would jolt. Time stretched out in its own quiet way. I once begged for sleep. I now feared it. Though medicine thinned her blood, it didn’t thin her will. Her spirit shimmered, fierce and still, while the world moved gently around her.
After three days of waiting, the procedure was abandoned because of too much bleeding — her arteries, unlike most, were too fragile. She was instructed not to move for the next 24 hours. Wrapped in a pressure bandage, the bed had to be tilted to feed her. No movement allowed. The following day: another cardiac MRI. No clots. How? More divine intervention. They needed to be sure. There is no medical test for miracles. And then, more tests. And more words entered our lives: antiphospholipid syndrome (APS) — the reason for the clots. Blood thinners became her tether, another daily guardian against the shadows.
Wrapped in caution, we scheduled an appointment to meet the cardiothoracic surgeon to discuss her valve — one of the top surgeons in the world, Professor Jacques Scherman, an aura of a saint curbing all our anxiety.
Options were explained one by one — pros and cons of the impossible. Then, looking straight at Mirske as if we weren’t in the room, he asked her what life looked like to her in the next five to ten years. After everything our child had just been through at nineteen years of age, our daughter still dreamed.
She spoke of horses, of work she loved, of a family she hoped to one day hold. She spoke softly and clearly, her words painting a future even as her present was filled with fear. I watched the surgeon’s eyes grow gentler as he listened, not to her symptoms but to her soul.
Our first option would be to prepare the mitral valve. This would prevent her youth on warfarin. We marked the date: November 21st — the day our son turned 14, the day our daughter’s heart would be in the hands of the surgeon.
I studied every detail of open-heart surgery, memorized the choreography of scalpels and sutures. Knowledge was my only armour.
Then we kissed her goodbye at the red line, asked her to smile. We told her that if she sees Willie (a dear friend we had lost in recent years), to just smile and wave at him, but not to follow him. The kind eyes of her anaesthetist put my fearful heart at peace as she touched my hand and promised to take good care of our child. And then the doors swallowed her whole. We watched as the wheels of her bed carried her into the unknown.
Five hours and twenty minutes. That was the measure of her absence. I kept count by the knowledge I had memorised. Each surgical step replayed like a desperate rosary, praying for a heartbeat that wasn’t mine.
The anesthetist, Dr Marie Bosman, a woman whose very presence seemed touched with grace, sent a photograph mid-operation: her heart, opened and fragile, betraying its secrets. The valve was too damaged, too diseased to be saved. They placed within her a mechanical valve — a piece of metal and a miracle, so that her life could continue its rhythm. The operation was a success!
The next day, they removed the machine, and with every breath she took on her own, we were humbled by the knowledge that God was, in fact, listening. He had been here with her the entire time.
The agony of healing began quickly: her sternum held together by wires and torture. Physio returned — relentless but necessary. The weight of tears and determination was visceral.
Yet even as her sternum knitted itself back together, a new cruelty emerged. The cruelty that was meant for headlines. The cruelty that happened to others.
After they had taken the pipes out, she told us that her skin burned with agony. The brush of the bedsheet was unbearable, as though her body was turning against her again. And with that, more tests. Panels of doctors with furrowed brows. A new diagnosis. Lupus — an autoimmune disease with no cure.
Another panel of specialists monitored her. Every day, a delicate balance of numbers and symptoms. Warfarin kept her new valve safe but stole from her the relief of medicines that might soothe her pain.
On 1st December (my husband’s birthday), she was discharged. We thought we had reached the end of the storm.
At her routine check-up a week later, a surgeon’s eyes caught what ours could not: the swelling of a neck vein. Within moments, an OR was readied. Fluid had pooled around her heart and lungs.
Back into the ICU, tethered once more — five drainage pipes. She was awake, trapped in that world of machines, trying to tell us that she didn’t want morphine, that its fog only brought her nausea. Even in her weakness, she chose defiance over surrender. We tried to lift her spirits as our own sagged under the weight of it.
The physio came again, as faithful as always, urging movement. Slowly, day by day, the pipes were removed, scans grew clearer and the tide of fluid receded. And then, one morning, the news we had held our breath for: her lungs were clear, her heart unburdened. At last, she could leave.
From May to December, we had lived in hospitals. Every month, another battle. Every week, another cliff-hanger. Now, at the end of the year, we were simply a family again — battered but intact.
We looked at her: our daughter, survivor of meningitis, stroke, APS clots, open-heart surgery, lupus, endocarditis, pericarditis, pleural taps — but we did not see illness. We saw a miracle.
She came home at last, carrying scars on her body but light in her eyes.
We are endlessly grateful to the doctors who swarmed like angels around her bed, to the village who carried us when we could not stand. So, we speak now not only as parents but as witnesses. Know the signs. Get vaccinated. Protect the ones you love. Our daughter is living proof that survival is possible. And so, we name her as we always will: our miracle. Our lion-hearted girl. Our Mirske.
She has returned to her horses, her studies, her dreams. She is not defined by what she endured; she is lit by it, sharpened and softened in equal measure.
How do I write a story worthy of my grief? How do I use pen and paper to convey an emotion I cannot name? A language I haven’t learnt yet — the dialect of breaking without shattering.
Songs have been written. Bible verses. Poems. All those words, wrapped around pain.
Maybe there is no answer. Maybe grief doesn’t speak. But this thing — this thing that only happens to other people, people you read about in headlines — it did happen to someone else. Another version of me. The one who didn’t know the medical term for heartbreak. The version of me who hadn’t yet been brought to my knees beside a hospital bed, giving all my thanks to God for proving them wrong.
