First-year university students are about seven times more at risk of meningococcal disease than other young people of the same age, according to UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA).<\/p>\n
O’Connor was 20-years-old when she contracted meningitis at university in Bristol.<\/p>\n
She said it happened “quite suddenly” and she got “really poorly very, very quickly”. <\/p>\n
“My head was a pain that I’d never experienced before,” she said.<\/p>\n
“I truly thought it was going to melt out of my ears, it was so painful.”<\/p>\n
Despite being put on a course of antibiotics by her doctor for suspected tonsillitis, it was her cat that helped raise the alarm.<\/p>\n
“My cat, the next day very early in the morning, [she] was screaming at my mum, miaowing quite loud,” she said.<\/p>\n
“And she led her into my bedroom and that’s when my mum found me convulsing in bed.”<\/p>\n
Rushed to intensive care, she was put into a medically induced comma.<\/p>\n
“They had to cover me in ice to try and cool my temperature down,” she said.<\/p>\n
“[And] my family were told to gather around and say goodbye.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"First-year university students are about seven times more at risk of meningococcal disease than other young people of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":787253,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[59,102,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-787252","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\/787252","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=787252"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/787252\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/787253"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=787252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=787252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=787252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}