Mum issues important warning to parents after her four-year-old son caught meningococcal disease

A mother has warned parents to watch for the signs of meningococcus after her son contracted the disease at the age of four.

In 2006, Mel Watts attributed her son Ayden’s symptoms, including vomiting and lethargy, to a virus that children are susceptible to when they enter school.

Ayden, now 16, deteriorated rapidly and was rushed to the emergency department where doctors treated him meningococci after noticing that a rash had developed on his stomach.

Mel, 36, wants other parents to familiarize themselves with the signs of the potentially deadly disease and tells her story as a cautionary tale not to question your mother’s instincts.

“The scariest thing is that I was fighting with my decision to take him to the emergency department,” the mother-of-four told FEMAIL.

“If I had just put him to bed that night, with how quickly things were changing, he wouldn’t have woken up the next day.”

Mel, from the NSW Central Coast, was at work when she received a call from teachers at Ayden’s school that he wasn’t “acting himself.”

“He was pretty tired and wouldn’t eat his lunch. They knew Ayden quite well and they knew this wasn’t for him,’ she said.

“I left work and came to preschool to pick him up. He had to go to the bathroom and then he vomited. That was the first sign that he was unwell and I assumed it was a normal childhood virus.’

Mel checked Ayden’s temperature at home, which was slightly elevated, so she gave him a soothing bath and some Panadol.

“There was no more vomit or diarrhea or anything like that, so I thought it was a one-time thing and he was running a fever. Then his nose ran a little bit,” she recalled.

‘It happened quite quickly. I automatically assumed, “Now he’s got a cold, maybe it’s a cold that confused him.”‘

Mel continued to watch Ayden’s temperature closely for the next few hours as it would spike and drop quickly.

“I put a blanket on him because he said he was cold and his temperature was cold, and within 10 minutes his temperature was way above 39 again,” she said.

“It jumped around.”

Mel fought with herself whether she should take him to the hospital.

“I felt like I was overreacting by taking him in there because kids get sick all the time. I didn’t want to waste anyone’s time,’ she said.

“But then I also knew something was wrong. Something in my gut said something was wrong.’

While Mel and her husband Nolan, Ayden’s stepfather, were taking care of the child, he started behaving very strangely.

‘Ayden looked up at us and started talking gibberish – he was talking through me, he made no sense. I just didn’t feel comfortable,” the mother said.

At that point, less than five hours after Mel picked Ayden up from school, she and Nolan put him in the car and rushed him to the emergency room.

“Once we were half way through and I was in the backseat, Ayden started falling in and out of sleep and became quite difficult to wake up,” said Mel.

“We tried to talk to him, play music, anything to keep him conscious because we thought if we stopped and called an ambulance it would take just as long to get there.”

Nolan carried a very floppy Ayden to the emergency department, where Mel told the hospital staff about his symptoms.

Doctors weren’t sure what was wrong with the child until they lifted his shirt and noticed a small rash starting to form.

“He was four, so I had him completely undressed, I bathed him, I dried him off, I’d seen his whole body at three and there was no rash,” Mel said.

“I don’t even know how to explain it – it was like a blotchy purple-red rash. It started on his stomach and spread quickly. By then he wasn’t really alert.’

The hospital staff immediately and correctly assumed that Ayden had contracted meningococcus and immediately started him on antibiotics.

“Because he deteriorated so quickly and was conscious when I put him in the car, but then semi-conscious when we brought him in, they knew whatever it was was going to get to him quickly and they had to do something,” she said. said, adding his results confirmed the doctors’ suspicions.

During the harrowing ordeal, Mel said she was “in fight-or-flight mode” and was relieved to have trusted her instincts when she knew something could be seriously wrong.

“I don’t even have the words to describe what it was like. I was a mess because I didn’t know what was happening to him and it happened so fast,” she said.

Tests came back and confirmed that Ayden had meningococcus and he was placed in isolation for 10 days so as not to infect anyone else.

Mel, Nolan and everyone who had come into contact with Ayden in the 24 hours before he started showing signs of the disease, including all the children in his kindergarten class, were given preventative medication in case they contracted meningococcus.

Ayden made a full recovery after his hospital stay and had no lasting complications thanks to Mel’s early intervention.

To this day, nearly two decades later, no one knows where Ayden contracted the contagious infection.

‘We couldn’t trace it back to anything; nobody had it,” Mel said.

Mel wants other parents to know about the signs of meningococcal disease because before Ayden contracted the disease, like many millennial moms, she only saw it as the “kissing disease” teens are prone to.

‘I didn’t really know much about it in children. It didn’t even occur to me then that it was meningococcal. I just had no idea it would even be that,” she said.

“I knew I had to look for a rash, but he didn’t have it when I looked. He only had a rash when he was in ED; it just went so fast.’

After her experience with Ayden, Mel is hypervigilant with her other three children, Ibie, 10, Indie, seven, and Sonny, six, when they feel sick and scans their bodies for signs of a rash.

By sharing her story, Mel hopes to inspire other parents to be advocates for their child’s care and not to doubt themselves when they think something is wrong.

“We have maternal instincts, or parental instincts. You know when something doesn’t feel right, and you’d rather just take them to the hospital to be assessed and told, ‘No, it’s fine, go home,'” she said.

‘You never know. Don’t doubt yourself and be your child’s advocate because they can’t always explain what’s happening to them.”