I thought my awful headache was flu — but it was meningitis
It’s not just children who are at risk from this terrifying illness — and it’s so easy for adults to mistake the symptoms
Meningitis is the nightmare illness that terrifies most parents. it’s an infection that can have quite terrible consequences, and babies and teenagers are particularly at risk.
But this dreadful infection isn’t fussy — it can strike adults, too.
Meningitis is a swelling of the meninges, or the tough outer membrane that covers the brain. there are two main variants of the disease: bacterial and viral.
Bacterial is much more dangerous — it can kill within four hours — and is triggered by meningococcal, pneumococcal and group B streptococcal bacteria.
One in ten will die and three in ten will be left with significant, life- changing disabilities. every year around 3,200 people in Britain get bacterial meningitis — the viral form is more common, but the true number of cases is difficult to estimate because the symptoms are often comparatively mild and so are mistaken for flu.
this is exactly what i concluded when six weeks ago i woke up with a mind-shattering headache that enveloped my whole body. My family is a stoical lot: we believe the doctors’ surgery is to be avoided except in absolute emergencies — and illness (when it occurs) can best be remedied by staying in bed and drinking plenty of liquids.
i consider myself robustly healthy, so had no reason to believe it was anything other than a nasty bout of flu, even though i generally don’t get headaches.
i remained cocooned under my duvet taking painkillers. But my crushing headache remained constant. On the fifth day, i knew something was very wrong.
My anxiety had deep, unsettling roots. A year ago, my eldest sister, Fizz, collapsed suddenly at her home. i got a call from the paramedics and rushed to join her at A&e. the news was terrible: she’d had a massive aneurysm — a bleed deep in the brain — and was transferred for emergency specialist surgery in a bid to save her life. tragically, she died just COuld four weeks later, aged 58.
my illness be in any way related? i rang nHs direct, described my flu-like symptoms, headache and family history. the operator told me to go to hospital immediately. A nurse looked me over; she wasn’t sure if i’d had a brain bleed, but sent me for a Ct scan to be on the safe side.
it didn’t show any abnormalities, so next a doctor performed a lumbar puncture — he inserted a needle into my spine and took a sample of the fluid.
Healthy spinal fluid should be as clear as water. My fluid was discoloured, implying i might well have had a bleed on the brain. But the lab also discovered white blood cells in t he discoloured fluid.
this implied that apart from a suspected bleed, i had a brain virus as well. Maybe meningitis should have been considered as a possibility, but the bleed seemed more likely.
later that evening, a doctor told me he’d been consulting with the nearest neurological hospital: the surgeons there wanted me to be transferred to their care.
Moments later i was in the back of an ambulance, blue lights flashing, on my way to the hospital 30 miles away. i’d be lying if i implied i wasn’t afraid.
it was late at night, i’d only ever been in an ambulance once before — with my sister 12 months earlier on her fateful journey to the same neurological hospital.
i was sent for more Ct scans on my brain and, when the results were inconclusive, an angiogram, where dye was inserted via a fine tube into an artery and fed through my body into my head to be scanned.
Orderlies wheeled me back to the ward; we’d wait on the outcome. it seemed an eternity. i dreaded the thought of surgery. i couldn’t help but picture my poor sister unconscious after her operation, hair cropped, skull stapled back together, tube in place to siphon off the fluid that flooded her brain, and a ventilator to breathe life back into her.
For the third time my results were negative: there was no bleed on the brain. However, there was obviously something wrong. What was it? My headache was still raging and i was given morphine.
the doctors looked at my various blood tests and returned. Opinion suggested encephalitis as the most likely culprit. i managed to google it on my phone: encephalitis is a swelling of the brain. if not caught early enough, the prognosis is bleak. Permanent brain damage including complications with memory, speech and language, epilepsy, physical and motor difficulties.
Mental vulnerability is an aspect of illness i’d not considered. i’d never felt so weak and my mind played unpleasant tricks — if brain damage had already been done, how would i know?
in the meantime, an intensive course of potent antibiotics was administered through an iV drip.
early the next morning, i spoke to another doctor. He had reassessed the diagnosis and established i had viral meningitis — they’d just not identified it earlier. i’d been ill for eight days and in hospital for three.
Bizarrely, the news seemed wonderful. i was, for a moment, the only man in the world thrilled to be told i’d got meningitis, because i thought it was relatively minor compared to encephalitis or an aneurysm.
‘the difficulty in identifying meningitis applies as much to health professionals as to anyone,’ says Adrian Robson from Meningitis Research Foundation. i’d not had the tell-tale signs: a rash, neck stiffness, light sensitivity and nausea. none of these applied to me and they don’t always show with the disease.
My symptoms could equally apply to an aneurysm, encephaliAll tis or flu.
the medics involved in my treatment were exemplary, but if they had difficulty isolating the illness, then what for the rest of us? it was frighteningly clear how misdiagnosis of meningitis can and often does happen.
Many health professionals talk about instinct. ‘lots of parents know instinctively when their child has meningitis and not just flu,’ says Kelly Archer from Meningitis now.
‘But because we associate the disease with the young, many adults don’t consider it as something they might have.’
trying to tell viral meningitis from flu is virtually impossible. its cause is an entero virus, responsible for upset tummies, but which can have severe consequences if it enters the brain.
there isn’t a treatment for viral meningitis other than painkillers and rest. However, though most people make a full recovery, some have long-lasting effects — including anxiety, depression, fatigue, hearing loss and dizziness — that seriously affect their lives.
After seven days in hospital, i rested at home for several weeks and now feel fighting fit. the recovery process is ongoing and though it isn’t a killer (like its bacterial cousin), viral meningitis can lay you low for months.
For more information, visit meningitis.org, meningitisnow.org