It is more than 20 years since TV presenter and pantomime star James Patrice ended up in intensive care with bacterial meningitis and septicaemia at the age of 10, but he says he still thinks about it every day.
“I was three days in intensive care, then high dependency, and then I was brought to a ward. It was 10 days in all in Temple Street.” Medical staff had told his parents they could not be sure he would pull through.
“Cliche as it is, they say your life flashes before you, and I believe that mine did.” Considering himself very fortunate to have made a full recovery, he thinks he is more appreciative of life and generally upbeat and positive as a result. “I could have died.”
[ How do I spot if my child has . . . meningitis? ]
He had started to feel sick on January 3rd, 2000, but thought it was probably because he had overdone it with the Christmas selection boxes of chocolates. Waking up at about 6am the following morning, he remembers going into the bathroom and trying to vomit but couldn’t. His mother came in to check on him and noticed red dots on his leg.
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“She knew straight away. I always say ‘my mum’s knowledge saved me’. It was all a bit ER next.”
Cliche as it is, they say your life flashes before you, and I believe that mine did
— James Patrice on his brush with bacterial meningitis and septicaemia
His parents whisked him to their local GP in Malahide, Co Dublin, “and somehow he opened the door at his family home at half six in the morning, my mother banging the door down, and he said right away ‘that’s meningitis’.”
He advised them to drive James to hospital themselves, and he would ring the ED so they knew to expect them.
Patrice, who created the drag persona Malahide Woman and will be the Genie in the Olympia pantomime this Christmas, has shared his story with the Meningitis Research Foundation as part of a new “Meningitis in your words” campaign to collect 2,030 such stories from around the world. The figure reflects the World Health Organisation’s global plan to defeat meningitis by 2030.
Meanwhile, Patrice encourages his social media followers to screenshot a card outlining the symptoms of meningitis and to keep it for quick reference in case the need arises.
It was through social media that Dubliner Emma-Jane McGovern became aware that meningitis did not always cause a rash. The disease was at the back of her mind after her baby daughter Quinn, aged seven and a half months, began to get very irritable and unwell one Sunday. However, an out-of-hours doctor thought it was constipation and teething, that she didn’t need antibiotics and that a suppository should help.
She was so lethargic, and when I picked her up she just screamed crying. It was a horrible, horrible cry
— Emma-Jane McGovern on daughter Quinn
“I was a first-time mammy and I thought, ‘Grand’,” says McGovern. But after she brought Quinn home, she started vomiting.
“I just said, ‘No I am not happy’. In my head I had meningitis but I was afraid to admit it to myself.” She had read up on the signs after a father had posted about losing a child to the disease. McGovern’s mother brought them to Crumlin hospital.
“I just went up to the station and said, ‘My daughter has meningitis’. They were like, ‘How do you know?’” While initially she and her husband Mark were told it didn’t sound like meningitis, they had hardly sat down in the waiting area with Quinn when they were called.
“She was so lethargic, and when I picked her up she just screamed crying. It was a horrible, horrible cry. They did all the tests and admitted us.” A lumbar puncture was negative for bacterial meningitis and a viral infection was suspected. Then a brain scan showed fluid and “inflammation of the meninges”.
“They never said the word meningitis to me,” she says. But their daughter’s medications were increased and “I think within about 36 hours, we could see Quinn coming back to herself.”
All along, she says, “I just followed my gut. And it was my gut coming from what I had seen on the ACT for Meningitis page – they saved her life.” She will be forever grateful to Siobhan and Noel Carroll, who founded the Aoibhe Carroll Trust (ACT) for Meningitis in 2011, after they lost their four-year-old daughter to the disease.
Quinn, now aged eight, is a happy, healthy girl, but she does have selective mutism, which could be a result of the meningitis. Meanwhile, McGovern is happy to share her experiences to help raise awareness, knowing that “if it helps just one other person”, it will have been worth it.
Consultant microbiologist Dr Sinéad O’Donnell, who is a board member at ACT for Meningitis, had a close call with the disease herself. She owes a huge debt of gratitude to some friends she went to New York with on a J1 visa at the age of 19. One morning she woke up feeling horrible, but told her friends she was just dehydrated, it was a hot summer, and that she would stay put drinking water for the day. “They went off to work. It was 1999 and there were no [mobile] phones, so they called on someone to [go] check on me.”
As it turned out, within the space of 11 hours she went from not feeling in any way unwell to being on life support.
If her friends had not trusted their instincts that there was something wrong and not gotten somebody to call to her, “they would have come home to a corpse”, she says simply.
One of the important messages that the charity wants parents to help convey to college students who may be living away from home is the need to regularly check on friends who feel unwell. If they have been socialising the night before, the presumption will be that they are just sleeping if off, and the “majority of time they will be right”, but just occasionally, as in her case, a check-in can save a life.
Surviving meningitis also gave Dr O’Donnell a new direction in life. She had been studying marine science, but after that “I changed to microbiology and ultimately ended up in medicine. My J1 visa changed my life completely.”
