Whenever meningitis hits the headlines, my mind flashes back to July 1987 and a small, whitewashed room off the paediatric isolation unit at St Thomas’s Hospital in London.
For it was there that a doctor uttered the most terrifying, heart-stopping words ever addressed to me.
My eyes still prick as I remember them, almost 30 years on.
TOM UTLEY: Whenever meningitis hits the headlines, my mind flashes back to July 1987 and a small, whitewashed room off the paediatric isolation unit at St Thomas’s Hospital in London (file image)
In our family album, we have a photo of Archie, then four months old, which I’d taken the day before, on a walk in the grounds of Hampton Court Palace.
My wife is standing by the lake on that muggy Sunday afternoon, holding the baby in her arms, with his elder brother beside her (we had only two sons then, two more were to follow).
A pair of swans are swimming in the background. Studying it now, I can see there is something not quite right about Archie — a vacant, listless expression in his slightly sunken eyes — but that day, we noticed nothing to worry about.
When we arrived home, he fed normally, had his bath and went straight to sleep as soon as his mother laid him in his cot.
By the next morning, it was clear that he was not well.
He had a high temperature and was vomiting everywhere. My wife said we should take him to the doctor, but I told her not to be silly. Didn’t all babies catch the occasional bug?
The boy would be as right as rain before we knew it.
The cells of the coxsackieviruses which an cause more serious infections like meningitis
Malingerers
Indeed, all my adult life, I’ve maintained that most illnesses get better of their own accord, without any need to trouble the medical profession.
Nine times out of ten, I reckon I’m right (though of course it’s identifying the tenth that’s the problem)
You could say I share at least some of the philosophy of Dr Christian Solomonides, the North London consultant who has been in trouble with the General Medical Council this week — in part, for posting a series of tweets laying into malingerers who clutter up doctors’ waiting rooms when there’s nothing much wrong with them.
As he put it in one of them (using more robust language than I would care to spell out in a family newspaper): ‘A few aches and pains… Who f****** cares… Just crack on like every other normal thinking person.’
But that July morning in 1987, my wife overruled me, ringing Dr Ruben at our surgery and making an appointment for five that afternoon (in those days there was nothing unusual about same-day NHS appointments).
Shaking my head over the folly of fusspot mothers, I set off for work, ringing home after lunch to ask how the baby was.
My wife said he’d been fast asleep all day. ‘Aha!’ I said. ‘I told you he’d get better in no time.’
But when I told her to cancel the appointment, she still wouldn’t listen. It wasn’t like Archie to sleep so much, she said. There was something up with him and she wanted to know what it was.
To my dying day, I will thank God this was one of our arguments that she won.
Shortly before 6pm, she rang me at my office in the Press Gallery at Westminster with an update.
Dr Ruben had said there was probably nothing to worry about but Archie’s stiff neck made him think there was just a remote chance he might have meningitis.
He had told her that to be on the safe side, she should take him immediately to casualty at St Thomas’s, just across the river from my office.
She was there now and she thought I’d better join her ASAP.
I still wasn’t worried. At the time, I knew nothing whatever about meningitis (although I was soon to become something of an expert).
Indeed, I’m ashamed to remember, that my first thought was: ‘Oh, good, she’s got the car. I’ll get a lift home.’
In no great hurry, I strolled across the bridge. It was only when I arrived at casualty that I began to realise that something was very seriously wrong with my son.
This was when a nurse, looking frighteningly sympathetic, told me that Archie had been admitted to the isolation unit and I should go straight there.
Sure enough, there he lay unmoving in a cot — a tiny, helpless figure, with a blazing hot temperature I could feel without touching his forehead. He was hooked up to all sorts of drips.
It was then that a doctor led me and my wife into that little whitewashed room and uttered the words I’ll never forget.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘he has a very good chance. It’s lucky you brought him here so soon.’
My heart leapt into my mouth. ‘A very good chance of what?’
He looked at me quizzically, as if I were a bit simple-minded. ‘A very good chance of surviving,’ he said.
Dangerous
And only then did the realisation crash over me of how dangerous meningitis is.
The doctor began warning us of possible long-term consequences. I remember him saying that Archie could lose his hearing — and did he say something about the chance of amputations?
By then, I wasn’t listening.
I was just praying fervently that he would live. If he went deaf, we would cross that bridge when we came to it. Whatever happened, we’d look after him.
For the moment, just let him grab that ‘very good chance’. Just let him survive.
I later learned that it was while he was waiting for tests in casualty that Archie had suddenly gone downhill.
His temperature had shot up and he had started vomiting again. A lumbar puncture confirmed meningitis and at that point, the NHS at its most magnificent swung into action.
I won’t go on about the anguish of the following ten days, when my wife took up residence beside Archie at St Thomas’s and it was touch and go.
I’ll just say that, no thanks to the boy’s damnfool father, the infection had been caught in time.
So it is, anyway, that I have a strong personal interest in the debate raging about meningitis jabs on the NHS.
As readers who’ve been following the story will know, the vaccinations have been offered free since last year to all babies under 12 months (which means Archie would have qualified, if he’d been born 28 years later).
But ministers have ruled that it would not be ‘cost effective’ to make the jabs available to older children on the NHS.
As I write, this decision is being challenged by a record 820,000 people who have signed an internet petition to Parliament, demanding that the vaccine should be offered to all under-11s.
In defence of the Government, it should be said that the UK is the only country in the world that offers the jabs routinely to children of any age.
It should also be said that the infection is mercifully rare, with only 276 children contracting meningitis B last year, of whom more than 100 were under one year.
Five months, apparently, is the age at which it is most common.
Furthermore, as hard-headed realists will argue, the spread of ever more expensive treatments means the day cannot be far away when it will be quite possible to spend the nation’s entire output on the NHS.
Since resources are necessarily limited, brutal decisions have to be made.
Frittered
Again, there is not much point in railing against ‘profiteering’ by drug companies.
After all, research, development and testing are hugely expensive processes, with most trials leading up blind alleys.
If firms such as GlaxoSmithKline weren’t allowed to profit from the odd breakthrough, there would be no such breakthroughs.
So says my head. Yet remembering my family’s experience, my heart tells me that the discount price offered to the NHS for meningitis B vaccine (£60 for a three- dose course) doesn’t seem inordinate, if it spares even a couple of hundred families from suffering what we went through (or much worse).
Indeed, when you consider the millions the NHS has frittered away on useless vaccines against various strains of flu, it seems cheap at the price.
But then, what does this complete layman know?
No, I’m going to wimp out of the debate and say that if there is one message parents should take away from this column, it is that they should be on the alert for the signs of meningitis and act fast if they see them.
It is thanks only to a mother’s instinct, Dr Ruben’s sound professional judgment and the consummate skill and dedication of the doctors and nurses at St Thomas’s that Archie, in possession of all his limbs and faculties, will be celebrating his 29th birthday on Sunday.
If it hadn’t been for them, the chances are we’d be shuffling off miserably to the cemetery, to lay flowers on a very small grave.
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