Meningitis took my limbs but I fought back so hard to return to normality
ACOUPLE of days before she fell ill, Linsay Robertson got a manicure. It was a glamorous, Shellac nail treatment, the sort of manicure designed to last a month without chipping. She was delighted with it.
In fact, things were going well in Linsay’s life across the board. At 43, she was in a wonderful new relationship and planning a holiday to Portugal with her partner Graham Welsh. Mum to 15-yearold Morran, she had a busy job as an office manager at an Edinburgh PR firm, and when she wasn’t out pounding the city streets in her trainers, she was socialising with friends or going to music gigs.
And then, one day at work last May, she started to feel ‘a bit rubbish’.
‘I left at 5pm on the dot, which was unusual for me, and just came home and threw myself into bed. When my daughter came home at 8pm I had a raging fever and was vomiting.’
The pair thought it was a tummy bug, possibly norovirus, and when her partner arrived and rang NHS 24 staff there thought the same. It was only when Graham popped out to buy some lemonade to settle her stomach and returned to find her writhing on the floor in agony that they realised this was something far more serious than gastroenteritis.
SHE said: ‘I started to get these really intense stomach cramps and when he walked back in the door I screamed at him “phone an ambulance, I think I’m dying”.’
By the time the ambulance arrived at the hospital her lips were turning blue, and a crash team was waiting. As she was rushed into A&E the last thing Linsay remembers is a doctor telling her ‘you’ve got a bug, but we don’t know what it is’.
In fact, Linsay had contracted bacterial meningitis and septicaemia. She was so critically ill that she was defined as the sickest person in the Lothian area, and placed into an induced coma. Her family were warned that the next 24 to 48 hours were critical.
On the day she was about to be put under, they were allowed one minute with her and Morran, who had been due to sit an exam that day, was told to get a cab from school and come to the hospital immediately to see her mother.
Today Linsay is an amputee, and on the waiting list for a kidney transplant. She lost both legs below the knee, her right hand and four and a half fingers from her left. But she is also bright, vivacious and full of laughter – the very picture of resilience in a life that has been turned so cataclysmically upside down. She has learned to walk again using prosthetic legs, is driving an adapted car, and hopes to return to work.
‘I remember lying in that hospital bed and telling my daughter “I’m going to walk again. I’m going to get back to normal, and we are going to have as normal a life as we can possibly have. This is not going to stop me”.’
And so it has proved, although it has been a long and challenging road. When doctors first brought Linsay round after 12 days in an induced coma, her body had swollen to four times its normal size. The tell-tale skin mottling of meningitis, which had been absent that first night, crisscrossed her body.
Her feet and hands were unrecognisable, her beautiful new manicure completely distorted.
‘My feet and hands were black, and my fingers were turned in like claws. My toes were like tiny wee black chips. I thought “there’s no way this is going to repair itself here”.’
Doctors gently broached the subject of amputation with her. Although her family were devastated, she remained pragmatic. ‘I couldn’t move. I couldn’t get up to go and have a shower. So I thought “well, something needs to go – because as long as I can’t move, I can’t move forward”.’
For a woman who had spent a life constantly moving, though, it was a huge adjustment.
‘One of the hardest things when I took ill was being stopped in my tracks. All of a sudden I didn’t have that freedom and movement. That was really tough.’
Then there was her relatively new relationship. She and Graham had been seeing each other for less than a year when she was struck ill, and although Graham hadn’t left Linsay’s bedside while had been in a coma, when she knew she was facing amputation, she told him he could leave.
‘Your first reaction is to say “You don’t need this, you never signed up for this. This is going to be a hell of a journey, it’s going to be tough and you don’t need to be part of this”,’ she said.
‘But he wouldn’t leave me. He stood by me and he’s continued to stand by me through it all. To do that takes strength.’
As Linsay learnt to adjust to life following amputation, there was another setback.
TESTS showed that her kidneys were barely functioning, and she was put on to regular dialysis and added to the transplant list. It hit her hard. ‘My kidney problems have actually been more difficult to deal with than the amputations,’ she said.
‘With the amputations, I had a certain amount of control over whether I walked again because it was me who had to put the effort in. But with my kidneys, I was never given the choice. It was thrust upon me.’
Since getting home from hospital, having learnt to walk on her prosthetic legs, she says she revels in the mundane, taking joy in the little things like cleaning, cooking and buying groceries.
‘Not long after I got home from hospital I was hanging washing on the dryer and I said to Graham “I’m so happy”. And it was because I was just doing something regular. Something normal that I never thought I would be able to do again. It makes you realise what’s important,’ she said.
There have been low points. She misses her hands and feet ‘every day’, and gets frustrated on days when fluid retention means she can’t wear her legs but must instead stay in her wheelchair. And, sometimes, people stare.
‘I find it better when I’m on my legs,’ she says. ‘People don’t tend to notice your hands until you’re doing something, but when they do I can see then getting a bit fixated on it.’
She and her medical team still don’t know how she caught bacterial meningitis.
She hadn’t been abroad or been scratched by an animal – things that would place her in a higher risk category.
Horrifyingly, her doctor suggested it could have been as straightforward as using a treadmill at the gym after somebody had sneezed on it.
She is passionate about educating others about the dangers of meningitis and hopes to take part in next year’s Seven Hills Edinburgh Race and Challenge for the charity Meningitis Now.
Determined to return – as much as she can – to the life she lived before, she insists: ‘It’s just getting on with it now. I just want to get back to life. And that’s coming.’