Marciano Nolan's story

On 2 January 2013 Maz fell ill. He was having problems for a while with other issues, so we thought it was a normal bug that was going around. He was complaining of headaches and pain in his back.

On 3 January, he said he had hurt his right arm, which had swollen and we thought he had broken it. It was very painful, and I said to him he needed to go to hospital to check it out.

On 4 January, Maz was then complaining of pain in both arms and feet, and he couldn’t get dressed or do basic day-to-day things. My friend took him to the accident and emergency department, who sent him away as he wasn’t an emergency and sent him to see the out-of-hours doctor. The doctor said he has swollen joints and took bloods. He was then sent home with very strong painkillers at around 11:45am. He sat with me for a bit and then went to bed, and within an hour I went to see him to see if he wanted any food or drink. At that time he had a headache and did not like the light, and was in darkness in the room.

Around 3:30pm he started to vomit badly for over an hour and it kept going. I thought it was the pain relief side effects, as he was in a lot of pain and couldn’t move.

Maz was rushed to the hospital

At 8:30pm I went to see him. I had been up and down the stairs all day every half an hour, and was taking care of my 11-year-old, seven-year-old and seven-month-old children. I called the out-of-hours doctor and they said they couldn’t get a GP out until midnight.

Within an hour I went back up to see him, and when he looked at me, his eyes stared and his pupils were moving left to right very quickly. I phoned for an ambulance, and when they came I told them the symptoms, and when they went to do his observations, he was very confused dehydrated and still vomiting and had a temperature of 39.9, so the paramedics took him.

At 11pm, I rang the hospital to see how he was, and they told me to ring in a couple of hours as he was still waiting to be seen. At 1am, I rang the hospital and they said he had a nasty infection. I said I would ring in a couple of hours.

I went up to accident and emergency, and within 10 minutes I saw Maz rushed in for a CT scan, and then doctors came to get me and said he was in ITU.

They tried so hard to save him, but it was too aggressive, and sadly I was told he had died on Sunday 6 January at 11:30am of meningococcal meningitis and septicaemia and brain stem cell damage.

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