A grieving mother has opened up about her daughter’s death to implore others not to overlook fatal symptoms.
21-year-old Jennifer Gray felt a twinge of a headache when she was out recently with friends. A mere 24-hours later the young woman had fallen into a coma after being taken to the hospital by her father.
Jennifer's mother Edwina has opened up about her daughter’s death and the devastation of meningitis.
“Meningitis struck my family. It came for us like a bolt from the blue,” the 52-year-old said to
The Daily Record.
“It is the worst possible thing to happen to someone who has an only child.”
“Now I’ll never be a gran. I selfishly think about that. I’ll never see her married. Maybe she was never going to be married because we didn’t get to see what the future held.”
“That opportunity is gone.”
Jennifer’s symptoms began in early April when she suffered with a persistent cold with a sore throat and a cough. Mere weeks later, on April 15
th, Jennifer was on a night out. When she felt unwell, she went home. The next morning, she still felt sick and had a headache, sore joints and nausea but attributed these to a hangover.
On Sunday 17th April Jennifer woke up with a sore head and neck. As the morning progressed her headache did not lessen with paracetamol and then ibuprofen.
When her symptoms worsened she contacted the NHS 24 was told to get to hospital.
“Her symptoms were atypical. She didn’t have a rash. When she phoned NHS 24, that was one of the things they were asking her,” said mum Edwina.
“Even when Jamie took her to the out-of-hours GP, the doctor thought she had the flu.”
Edwina followed her husband and Jennifer to hospital and when she arrived
“I was shocked by the condition she was in. She looked horrendous. Within that hour since I last saw her, there was a rapid increase in symptoms,” she said.
“The hospital said they hadn’t seen the illness move as fast as with Jennifer. She came in with vague symptoms and within hours, she was dead.”
“We didn’t know it was meningitis until the following day when the public health department told us.”
Edwina says though Meningitis is something you look out for in young children, at no age should the disease be overlooked.
“When your kid is small and they’re unwell, that is one of the first things you think of,” she said.
“But as a 21-year-old woman, who just seemed to have a hangover, it wasn’t something we thought about. I thought, ‘She’ll be OK’. But it was the opposite. It was a nightmare.”
“I just want people to know how fast the illness took her. One minute she was fine. The next minute she was brain dead.”
“We want to keep on going to make sure something like that doesn’t happen to anyone else,” concluded Edwina.
image via The Daily Record
