Beach meningitis survivor encourages others to get vaccine

VIRGINIA BEACH

When Gerald Pe heads to Virginia Tech later this month, he'll be required to have a meningitis vaccine or sign a waiver saying he knows the risk of not getting one.

The 20-year-old Virginia Beach man knows the danger all too well.

He narrowly survived a bout with bacterial meningitis - an infection of the fluid around the spinal cord and brain - last year when he was living at home and attending Tidewater Community College.

His parents, Grace and Flodoir Pe, watched in horror on May 1, 2007, as his arms and legs turned from red to dark purple to black in a matter of hours. Infection was racing through his body. His first symptoms - fatigue and backache - had started only 24 hours earlier.

The next six months proved harrowing:

Fifty-four days in Sentara Virginia Beach General Hospital. The front part of both his feet amputated, taking him from a size 12 shoe to a 7. Months of painful removal of dead tissue, skin grafting and physical therapy.

He shares his experience to encourage others to get a vaccine before heading off to college. Virginia is one of 21 states in which students of four-year colleges - a high-risk population - are required to either have the vaccine or sign a waiver. Because he was a community college student last year, he didn't get one.

"Nothing triggered us to get the vaccine," said his mother, Grace Pe, a U.S. Coast Guard security specialist.

On April 30 of last year, Pe went to the beach with a friend. His back started aching, and the sunlight hurt his eyes. Soon he was having to stop to rest on benches.

He started to feel feverish and figured he was getting the flu, so he went home. He told his mother he had a fever and was going to sleep it off.

He usually wakes up by 8, but the next day he didn't awake until 11 a.m. He stood up but felt so weak he fell back on his bed. He stood up again and made it to his computer chair, which has wheels. He rolled himself to the kitchen to get something to eat and drink.

Then he rolled his chair to the bathroom and took a shower. He sat back down on his chair to roll back to his bedroom. But when he got there, he didn't have the strength to lift the chair over the molding between the hallway and his room.

So he sat there, too weak and confused to call 911 or his parents.

He usually takes his sister, now 13, to the bus stop, but she had called her mother that morning to tell her she had walked because Gerald hadn't gotten out of bed in time. After calling home repeatedly, Grace became concerned and asked her husband to go home during lunch to check on him.

When Flodoir got there, Gerald was still sitting in the computer chair, barely conscious. He had red splotches up and down his legs and arms. His nose was red and he was hot to the touch.

Flodoir called 911.

Gerald remembers only snapshots during the next few minutes: being carried on a stretcher down the front stairs of their home. Someone asking him to touch his chin to neck and move his head side to side. Being asked to recite his Social Security number... telling them the first three numbers...

And that's all he remembers clearly until he woke up several days later in the intensive care unit.

Sometime between those two points, though, he remembers a dream that felt like a near-death experience.

He thought he was on an airplane with a family friend, his cousin and a stranger.

The pilot said he was about to take off, and Gerald insisted on sitting next to the stranger. The family friend put a rosary - with unusually shaped square beads - on his chest.

As the airplane was flying, he saw bright light coming through the front windshield of the airplane.

In the emergency room, meanwhile, his father noticed he looked like he was either crying or laughing, but it was hard to tell because of his oxygen mask.

"Gerald, what's wrong?" Flodoir asked.

"Dad, it's better up here," he said.

Flodoir used to be a Navy corpsmen and had been in a lot of emergency medical situations, but seeing his son's skin turn black in a matter of hours and watching him gasp for air made him feel faint.

About that time, Grace arrived in the emergency room. When she saw her husband, he was so white, she thought he was sick, too.

Grace leaned over her son, and Gerald repeated, "It's actually better up here."

She hit him in the chest and said, "Gerald you can't leave me this way."

He was whisked from the emergency room to the intensive care unit, where he was put on a respirator and a dialysis machine because his kidneys were failing.

Blood tests and a spinal tap showed he had bacterial meningitis and septicemia, a blood infection.

The list of possible outcomes was sobering: brain damage, blindness, kidney failure, amputations, death.

In his dream, he felt as though the plane were landing when he regained consciousness three days later.

He gradually improved over his nine days in ICU, where he received IV antibiotics. Once the danger of dying passed, he was moved to another unit of the hospital for treatment of the damaged tissue and skin.

Because meningitis is a communicable disease spread by close contact with bodily fluids, Virginia Beach Health Department officials became involved in the case, advising those closest to him to take a course of antibiotics.

The family never was able, though, to determine just how Gerald contracted the disease.

Once he moved to Room 478, Gerald endured weeks of "debridement," removal of the damaged and dead tissue on his legs.

Tending the wounds took hours, several times a week.

"It felt like they were ripping my skin off."

The first of nine surgeries came on Memorial Day weekend. Gerald expected more debridement to be done, but doctors discovered the tissue was so infected, amputation was needed to prevent more infection.

While Gerald lay unconscious, doctors presented his parents with two options. Amputation of the toes and front part of the foot. Or amputation below the knees, which would give him more mobility because he'd be fitted with prostheses.

The parents decided to go the less radical route, figuring Gerald could decide on his own later if he wanted amputation below the knee.

The memory of that decision still haunts Grace. "I hated that consultation room."

Grace and Flodoir thought they would tell Gerald the next morning about what had happened during the surgery, but one of his doctors, who did his rounds early, reached him first and told Gerald about the amputation.

"I cried my eyes out. I bawled," Gerald remembers.

Eight more surgeries would follow, during which pins were placed in his foot, and skin grafts from one part of his body were used to repair his feet and legs.

He went home in June and over the next few months went from wheelchair to walker to crutches. By December, he could walk using special leg braces.

"I can shoot baskets, but I can't play basketball. I can't run, but I never really liked running anyway. I don't walk as fast, but I can do most everything I used to do."

In February, he returned to the high school he graduated from in 2006, Ocean Lakes, to tell students about his experience, and encourage them to get the vaccine that protects against meningitis.

Later this month, he'll head to Virginia Tech to major in finance.

He never did figure out who the stranger was sitting next to him on the plane in his dream, but the friend who gave him the rosary came to visit the family when he returned home from the hospital that summer.

She prayed a rosary for him and placed it on his chest.

The unusual, square-beaded rosary was the one he remembered from his dream.

Elizabeth Simpson, (757) 446-2635, elizabeth.simpson@pilotonline.com