Leah Mae Carroll's story

On 3rd Jan 2014, Leah Mae started to become unwell, refusing feeds, moaning, going in and out of sleep, being sick, shaking and she had a high temperature with cold hands and feet.

I called NHS24 who told me they had an appointment for 12:50 - over an hour and 20 minutes to wait. I finally got Leah Mae into St John’s Hospital in Livingston. They looked her over, her temperature was up to 40 -she was so HOT. I got sent up to the children’s ward, where they looked her over, by then she was coming up in little red dots. The nurse looked at them, said nothing, gave her CALPOL, told me her temperature had gone down to 38.8 and that I could go home, so I did.

Within 5 hours I had taken her back in. She was grey and had lots of dark looking marks over her. The doctors grabbed her out of my arms and ran with her. I waited for a doctor to return and was then told my baby was seriously ill and that doctors from the Royal Hospital for Sick Children in Edinburgh would be coming to move Leah Mae there.

They let me and her dad, Robert Carroll, in to see her. She was lying in the bed crying and wouldn’t open her eyes. They told us they wanted to put her to sleep, put her on something to help her breath and asked us to leave for an hour while they got her ready for the move to the Royal Hospital for Sick Children.

Two and a half hours passed before we could go back in and see her. As I walked into the room my beautiful baby girl was lying all covered up with doctors around her with all these black marks on her - the MENINGOCOCCAL SEPSIS had taken over.

So after every hour, her organs began to fail. By the time we got to the Royal Hospital for Sick Children, my baby was fighting for her life. At 3:25 my Leah Mae passed away. When asked the question if my baby girl had been treated at 1 in the morning and not sent home would she still have been here, they answered, YES!!!

She should have been treated as soon as I called, because at 10 weeks she had LISTERIA, another form of meningitis. So my child should have been kept in and treated asap. As she had been in before with the same kind of thing, she should have been a PRIORITY, not sent home. We are now fighting for Leah's case to be looked at and why she was sent home.

Tanya Yeats
January 2014