In the morning hours of March 28, 2007, Rick Haygood, 21, wasn’t sure what was happening. His friend, 18-year-old North Little Rock native Allison Shaw, had just collapsed in the parking lot of Baton Rouge’s Ochsner Medical Center. He hoisted her up and carried her inside, where a surgical-suited mob whisked her to a room, ripped open the back of her shirt and prepped her for a spinal tap. Just as Shaw feebly protested – “Wait, don’t those hurt?” – a nurse barked at Haygood to get out, writes Cheree Franco in Family.
For Haygood and Shaw, this was the second Ochsner visit of the day. The first time, Shaw was nauseated and complained of a migraine. The pair were ushered to a tiny room and provided a paper bucket for Shaw to throw up in. It took about 10 hours for the on-call doctor to see her, prescribe anti-nausea pills and send her back to the apartment she was sharing with three friends.
A few hours later, the medicine wasn’t working, and Shaw had developed purple bruises on her arms and legs. She woke Haygood and asked him to take her back to the emergency room.
Now the doctor was calling it meningitis, a word that meant nothing to Haygood. All he knew was, Shaw came to Baton Rouge for spring break fun, and she was dying behind a door that, because he isn’t family, he couldn’t enter.
Shaw survived. See Wednesday’s Arkansas Democrat-Gazette for the rest of the story of this survivor of bacterial meningitis.