NEED TO KNOW
Eliana Shaw-Lothian was an 18-year-old dancer in her first year at England’s University of Surrey when she began to suffer from bad headaches
Her condition deteriorated quickly, and soon the teen was vomiting, struggling to move and unable to answer her worried parents’ calls
After her roommate found her, Shaw-Lothian was brought to the hospital, where doctors said she was in “acute danger” from bacterial meningitis
A college student is speaking out about the scary illness she experienced as a freshman that left her on a ventilator.
During her first year at the University of Surrey, Eliana Shaw-Lothian, then 18, said she’d been struggling with intense headaches.
At first, she tried to sleep it off.
“I slept throughout the entire day and by the evening, although the headache had gone, I was very shaky and dizzy whenever I stood up, as well as feeling faint,” Shaw-Lothian, now 20, recalled in an essay for the Meningitis Research Foundation. She also remembers having “really cold feet and hands.”
Eliana Shaw-Lothian / SWNS
Eliana Shaw-Lothian with her father
When she called home, her mom asked if she had a rash, which is a common symptom of meningitis. But Shaw-Lothian didn’t see anything like that. She tried to rest again, but later that night, “I started severely throwing up, as well as having difficulty moving due to stiff muscles and joints in my neck, arms, and legs.”
Meningitis is a life-threatening inflammation of the meninges, which surround your brain and spinal cord. It is spread through close contact with an infected person, such as through respiratory droplets from coughing or sneezing. As the Cleveland Clinic explains, living “in a group setting, like in a college dorm” puts you at an increased risk of meningitis. Symptoms include fever, severe headache, neck stiffness, nausea, vomiting and light sensitivity.
Shaw-Lothian said she even felt paralyzed at some points, which was extremely troubling to her as a dancer. Then her sickness got worse.
Her parents — now extremely worried — had repeatedly called her phone until a roommate heard it going off. The roommate found Shaw-Lothian “completely delirious in my bedroom.” Her parents contacted campus security immediately and arranged for an ambulance to take the teenager to the emergency room.
“My last memory was thinking I needed to go to the hospital,” Shaw-Lothian said. “My next memory was waking up in the hospital three days later.”
Eliana Shaw-Lothian / SWNS
Eliana Shaw-Lothian, now 20, is sharing her experience to raise awareness of the symptoms of bacterial meningitis.
When she arrived, “my lips had started to turn blue,” says Shaw-Lothian, whose telltale meningitis rash had begun to appear. She was hallucinating and deteriorating “rapidly,” she says — and was sent to the ICU.
By that night, “they were treating me for bacterial and viral meningitis, as well as sepsis,” adding that she was so sick, they didn’t want to wait for the test results to come back.
After telling her parents she was in “acute danger,” doctors put her in a medically induced coma. They put her on a ventilator and gave her a feeding tube until she began to show signs of fighting the infection.
“Waking up was terrifying,” Shaw-Lothian, said, sharing she will “never forget” being told she had bacterial meningitis and had been close to death.
Two years later, the college freshman is left to grapple with lasting effects of her illness, like hearing loss and loss of motor skills. “Eating and walking was a struggle to begin with, and as a dancer, that was very hard for me to come to terms with,” she said.
“It has been a struggle mentally to get back on my feet and recover from this illness as well as process what I went through,” she said. “But despite still having fluid around my heart as well as concentration problems, I have fully resumed university life as much as possible.”
Eliana Shaw-Lothian / SWNS
Eliana Shaw-Lothian, now 20, had bacterial meningitis during her first year at school.
She’s since joined her school’s dance squad and is back to competing. “You want to get back to normal and do things you used to do as soon as possible,” she said. But, she also wants those at risk to recognize the signs of meningitis and to accept the complexity of the recovery process.
“Understanding the signs and symptoms could potentially be lifesaving, especially in the context of university life in student accommodation, where you might not know the people you are sharing with.”
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