When doctors amputated Sara Loos’ legs in a last-ditch attempt to save her life, the brave teenager still triedto look on the bright side. “Great, now I can go to the Paralympics,” she told her parents, Robert and Caroline, as she lay in intensive care. “Can I have prosthetics which will make me taller?”
And even after her right arm had to be removed, the sports-mad teen shed a few tears but never complained. Courageous to the end, Sara lost her fight 10 weeks after becoming ill, leaving her family devastated. Shockingly, the cruel disease that took this promising young woman’s life is one that many Kiwis believe is no longer a danger – meningitis.
Sara (18) died as a result of meningococcal C virus – a strain of the devastating infection that is not covered by the current vaccine for meningococcal B. There have four deaths from meningitis in New Zealand this year. Although the UK and Australia offer free vaccination against the meningococcal C strain of the disease,
Kiwis who want this vaccine have to pay between $80 and $100 for it. Sara, a talented hockey player whoattended James Hargest College in Invercargill, began feeling ill four days after her school ball. “I think I’ve got the flu,” she told her mum.
The usually healthy teenager went to bed with a mild fever and the next morning woke with excruciating back pain and a rash on her chin. Although both are signs of meningitis, other key symptoms were missing. “She didn’t have a headache, nausea or a stiff neck,” Caroline explains.
But realising Sara was going downhill fast, Caroline took her straight to the family GP who diagnosed meningococcal disease and sent her to Southland Hospital. That night, doctors gave Sara’s parents, Robert and Caroline, devastating news – they needed to say goodbye to their daughter because she wasn’t going to make it through the night. “That was the most shocking part,” Caroline recalls.
“I said to the doctor, ‘You will have to tell her dad, because I can’t.'” Together, Caroline (42) and Robert (45)tried to find the words to tell their daughter she was about to die. “I said, ‘Sara, this is really serious – you have meningococcal septicaemia and you know what this could mean.’ She just looked at me and said, ‘I love you,'” recalls Caroline.
However, Sara, who was transferred to Dunedin Hospital for dialysis to help her failing organs, did make it through the night – and another 68 nights. It was on day 12 that her legs were amputated and a few days after that she was transferred to oiddlemore Hospital in Auckland where her right arm was removed along with dead tissue from her left arm.
“She understood the reality – she cried that she wouldn’t be able to play hockey the same way she had been and that she wouldn’t be able to write without a right hand,” says Caroline. “I told her, ‘You’re still going to have a really good life.’ And she looked at me and said, ‘No, I’m going to have an even better life.'”
Although she was gravely ill, Sara still thought of others. “When she heard about a child in the hospital who had lost a sibling in a car accident, she asked that some of the soft toys she’d been given could be passed along to the child,” says Robert.
Doctors told Caroline and Robert that once they started cutting away dead tissue, surgery would be needed almost every day in an effort to stop the disease spreading further. Sara endured 30 operations but never gave up her will to live. And on two more occasions, when doctors once again thought she was about to die, she rallied. “It was a rollercoaster all the time,” Robert says. “I’d think, ‘How many times do we have to fall to the bottom?’ It got to the point where I’d fear having hope.”
Robert and Caroline believe Sara would have embraced rehabilitation with the same spirit she had lived her life, but in the end, the infection was too overpowering. In July, after yet more surgery, Caroline knew Sara wasn’t going to make it. “When I looked at her, I could tell,” she says. With Sara’s life slipping away, the nurses allowed Caroline to get into bed beside her daughter and hold her close, as she had done many times in her too-short life.
“For half an hour, we hugged, which was great,” Caroline says, speaking through tears. “She snuggled into me, then went peacefully after I told her all the important things.” Since losing Sara, Caroline and Robert have found out about a vaccine that could have protected her against meningococcal C. Sara and her siblings, Rachel (16) and Adrian (20), had all had the meningococcal B vaccine. But the grieving parents say that, had they known about the C-strain vaccine, they would have made sure their children got that too.
At her funeral, Sara, who had a part-time job at The Warehouse, was farewelled by more than 600 workmates, school friends and hockey buddies, as well as teachers, family friends and members of the church she attended. It’s now several weeks since Sara’s death and her parents say they’re slowly adjusting to the loss. “I think, for your own mental health, you have to move past the ‘why’,” Robert explains. “It doesn’t matter if you’re good or lead a healthy life – bad things can happen to good people.”
Caroline believes Sara is finally at peace after fighting so hard for so long. “It was the worst outcome for us but if she’d lived, it would have been a real struggle for her,” she says.
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