TOMMY SMITH, THREE

TOMMY SMITH, a smiley threeyear-old, died in January last year, 16 hours after he first became ill.

‘I was with him all day at home,’ his dad Martin, 46, from Tamworth, Staffordshire, recalls. ‘Up until 1pm, he was normal.

‘Then he just lay on the floor and started mumbling and grumbling. He was unusually tired and didn’t want to do anything. I gave him Calpol and kept checking him.’

When Sharon, his wife, came home at 6pm, she noticed a small spot on Tommy’s neck, then more around his groin. He also had a high temperature.

They took Tommy straight to Good Hope Hospital in Birmingham, where after just half an hour, doctors confirmed his parents’ fears: Tommy had meningitis B.

The rash spread wildly, and Tommy was put on a ventilator before being transferred to Stokeon-Trent. Within 90 minutes, he had suffered three cardiac arrests.

‘Everything is still a horrible blur,’ says Martin. ‘They took us out of the room while he was in cardiac arrest. Then they came and sat us down, and asked our permission to turn the machines off. He was already gone.

‘We didn’t get to say any last words. Everybody was in tears.’

In the midst of their grief, the Smiths, who have another son, Matthew, 19, were told that a vaccine would soon be available. The jab began being included as a routine jab for newborns on September 1 last year — the day before what would have been Tommy’s fourth birthday.

‘Tommy died at the age of three,’ says Martin. ‘That is proof the vaccine needs to be offered to children of all ages.’

FOR advice, visit meningitis.org and meningitisnow.org