Meningitis Awareness Week Day 2

First Annual

World Meningitis Day
April 25th 2009
Meningitis Week - Day 2
Meningococcal Disease - What does it look like?


One of the "tell-tale" signs of Meningococcal Disease is the rash that appears on the body. The troubling thing is, once the rash get's to that point, the disease has already rapidly progressed & infection is in the bloodstream. The disease progresses even quicker from here on out. That is called "Septicemia". This rash will not blanch, which means if you look at the rash under a glass cup the rash will not disappear from the pressure you apply.

**GRAPHIC PICTURES BELOW**




Here are pictures of what the Meningococcal rash looks like. These are different stages of progression. This is exactly the type of rash Landan had.

*Note - These are not actual pictures of Landan. I'm using these pictures as a visual*

This is how Landan looked when I woke to find him laying on the floor at the end of my bed. When I was on the phone with my mom & then called 911, I told them it looked like he had bruises all over his body.


The pictures that follow are what the rash looked like when we saw Landan an hour after we got to the hospital. They'd rapidly progressed into this darker color & started covering his limbs instead of being spaced out like the first picture.

In this picture you can see that the infection is mostly in the limbs, you might be wondering why? It's because our bodies push the infection out to the limbs in attempt to protect our "core" organs from failing. Which makes alot of sense, it's pretty crazy to realize how smart our bodies are! We can live without our limbs, but can obviously not without our important organs. But this picture depicts VERY well how Landan looked in the end. My poor sweet little man. It makes me so sad to know what his body endured.


An excerpt from Landan's Story
"At 9am I woke up to find Landan laying on the floor next to my bed covered in, what looked to me, like bruises. I sat up straight in bed and frantically tried to focus my eyes because I couldn't believe what I was seeing. I thought he was dead, I was so afraid to touch him. I thought he was going to be cold. Once my eyes focused I saw he was breathing, touched him and felt that he was still warm. I ran to the kitchen where my cell phone was plugged in, I yelled Landan's name while I was running to the kitchen so he would stay conscious. I called my mom and then 911. When the paramedics arrived they checked his vitals but they knew he was sick so took him out to the ambulance. I remember sitting in the ambulance and asked the driver when we were going to leave, it felt like we sat their forever. We took him to the best hospital in the area, Toledo Children's Hospital. The last thing Landan said to me while we were in the ER before they took him up to the PICU was "Mama hold me" but I couldn't because they needed to get him up to the PICU as soon as they could. I think I said "It's ok bebe." We followed him up, and I remember my mom asking the doctor on the way up if he was going to be ok, and he said something like "... he's a very sick little boy ..." We waited in the waiting room down the hall from the PICU for about an hour. Before the doctor came down they sent a Chaplin in to talk to us, my mom knew then that he was really sick. The PICU doctor came in shortly and told us Landan had bacterial meningitis and it was a 90% mortality rate."

www.angellandan.com