Saul was 17 and on a school trip when he first started feeling cold and experiencing sensitivity to light, but when a purple rash developed, the family went to A&E.<\/p>\n
“It all happened very fast,” said Saul. “When my mum used the word meningitis, I could see how worried she was. It was really concerning – it was all so alien to us.”<\/p>\n
Saul spent a week in hospital and said the experience was “really scary”, especially as he was so young.<\/p>\n
Almost exactly a year later, his then 16-year-old brother Drew began to feel unwell as he was studying for his GCSEs with a high temperature but no other obvious symptoms.<\/p>\n
Things escalated quickly following a trip to the GP.<\/p>\n
“When I left the house I had no rashes on me at all. When the doctor lifted up my top, I had a big rash all over my chest and belly,” he said, adding that purple dots on the roof of his mouth had also developed.<\/p>\n
Drew spent two weeks on the children’s ward at Wrexham Maelor hospital.<\/p>\n
“I did think it’s a bit weird isn’t it really that we’ve both caught it, what are the odds of that?” said Saul.<\/p>\n
It was touch and go for the first 48 hours before Drew slowly began to recover, but he lost a lot of weight and it would be months before he felt completely well.<\/p>\n
“I’m really thankful the doctor called the ambulance straight away when he noticed the rash – those quick decisions potentially saved our lives,” said Drew.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Saul was 17 and on a school trip when he first started feeling cold and experiencing sensitivity to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":785927,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[59,102,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-785926","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-gb","tag-health","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/785926","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=785926"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/785926\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/785927"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=785926"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=785926"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=785926"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}