Alexis Charlotte Kavanagh's story

Alexis was admitted to hospital due to feeding issues at 3 and a half months old she was rejecting bottles and she had thrown up once.

We were told by the paediatrician not to worry and she was put on a drip and antibiotics for a suspected urinary tract infection. We were told she would have a lumbar puncture performed that evening as a precautionary measure.

By the time evening came Alexis had settled down and started feeding again she had no temperature and all her vitals were perfect so the doctor decided to postpone the lumbar puncture until the morning.

Alexis had a bottle at 12 am that night and settled down back to sleep. At 4am the nurse on duty checked her blood pressure and her vitals again which all came back normal. I put Alexis in her cot and she fell back to sleep

I then had a nap when I woke I seen Alexis was lying flat in the cot, which was unlike her as she suffered from acid reflux. I got up to check on her the first thing I did was touch her face and straight away I felt she was ice cold, so I picked her and when I did her whole body was completely limp. Normally she’d curl up her legs when I’d pick her up. This time she didn't. I knew in my heart she was gone

I hit the emergency button and ran into the hall and screamed for help a nurse ran down and took her out of my arms and told me to wait outside while she paged other nurses for help.

What happened next was a bit of a blur. Two nurses came running, one ran into Lexis' room, the other pulled me away to ring my family and Lexi's dad to get them to the hospital.

While we were standing there one of the nurses came running out of Lexis' room and went on the phone and called the crash team. She rang them three more times before the crash team arrived.

When the crash team arrived I was moved to a different room where Lexis' father then joined me. It felt like hours before the consultant came down and told us basically there was nothing more they could do and that she was gone. I begged the consultant to keep trying. He then asked me to come down to her room when we arrived they were still performing CPR I walked in and seen they had put a tube in her nose and every time they pressed on her chest blood came out her nose. I knew then it was time to stop, she was gone and she wasn't coming back.

In the hours/days following we found out that Lexi had late onset GBS meningitis which I had never even heard of. We recently found out she also had viral meningitis, neither of which were picked up on. We are still awaiting a full post mortem a year later, although I don't think we will ever get the answers we need, but we hope in sharing Lexis' story that we can raise awareness of Group b Strep in the hopes that in the future all woman will be screened for GBS and until a vaccine becomes available for both early and late onset Group B Streptococcus.

In Loving Memory of our little Lexibops xxx

Paige Curran
December 2018