Silent Killers: Meningitis Strikes

In March, 2000, John Kach, a college freshman at Salve Regina University in Newport, R.I., was having the time of his life.

“I started concentrating on basketball, started to lift, getting my grades up, going to parties, doing my thing,” the young man recalls.

Then, the six-foot-four, 210-pound athlete lost everything in a nightmare that began when he was recovering from what he thought was the flu. Peter Van Sant reports.

“I was in my dorm room on a Friday night. Wasn’t feeling all that great, so I stayed in,” John remembers. “All of a sudden, my stomach doesn’t feel right and, then I started getting real hot, fever.”

When John’s fever soared to 105,he was rushed to the hospital.

John’s mother Paige was more than 150 miles away at her home in Carmel, N.Y., when she got a call from an emergency room doctor.

“I remember falling to my knees saying, ‘My God, what’s happening? What’s wrong?’” Paige said.

John had contracted a rare but often fatal form…of bacterial meningitis that attacked and shut down his major organs.

“There’s very little warning and if you don’t see someone very early, it can be difficult to prevent death,” said Dr. Mitchell Levy, intensive care specialist at Rhode Island Hospital who placed John in an induced coma while he battled the disease with massive amounts of antibiotics.

John most likely caught the disease at college. Bacterial meningitis is spread through saliva. Studies show that college freshmen living in dorms are in the highest risk group. Each year, more than 100 college freshmen like John come down with it.

“Why eight people can be exposed to it and only one person gets it, is still a mystery to medicine,” Dr, Levy says. “I’ve seen young people come in with a sore throat and be dead within 24 hours.” Within the first two days John was given his last rites twice.

“I remember going into John’s room and he was under and I remember saying to John, ‘If you can’t do this, if you can’t make it through this, you go ahead and go. Mommy’ll understand. But, if you want to do this and you want to fight, we will fight this as a family.’”

Even Dr. Levy thought John would die, “not just when he first came in, but honestly, for quite a while after he was in the ICU.”

Weeks passed, and the Kach family camped out in the hospital waiting room. John’s father, Mike Sr. remembers the fear: “Just, pure, pure fear.”

After six weeks of treatment, Dr. Levy decided to bring John out of the induced coma. “It was probably one of the happiest days of my life,” says Paige.

But John’s physical ordeal was just beginning. The meningitis prevented blood from circulating to John’s limbs, causing tissue to die. Amputation was inevitable.

“I have never begged for anything in my life,” John says, “but, I did beg the doctor, ‘Please be as conservative and frugal as you possibly can.’”

John lost both hands and both legs but not his will. He triumphed over five grueling months in rehab.

“He said to me once, ‘Why me, ma? I tried to do it by the book. Why me?’ I had no answers,” Paige says. “I said, ‘Honey I don’t know. You did it right.’ And, he never asked me that again.”

Today, with the help of his family, John can to do just about everything, even play basketball.

He is on a mission to let people know that most forms of the disease can be prevented with a single shot.

“I knew about the vaccine,” John says. “Didn’t get it; wish I did.”

John and his mother are now part of a group called Moms on Meningitis. Their message: What happened to John doesn’t have to happen to you.

“We have learned of a lot of young people’s lives who could have been saved if only we had been vaccinating years ago,” says Dr. James Turner, executive director of student health at the University of Virginia, where all incoming freshmen are required to be vaccinated for bacterial meningitis.

The vaccine was first developed in the 1960s after a series of meningitis outbreaks in crowded military barracks.

“About 1971, every single military recruit started receiving this vaccine, and the outbreaks of the disease virtually stopped,” Dr. Turner says.

Today, crowded college dorms are the breeding ground for the disease, but only 14 states now mandate that all incoming freshman be vaccinated. The cost of mandatory vaccinations is between $70 and $80 per student.

Dr. Turner hopes that someday, all 50 states will make the shot mandatory.

“It’s a God-awful disease,” he says. “And, I have sat in the intensive care units with families as they’ve watched their children cling to life and it’s terrible. And to think that for $70 to $80, we can prevent that, it’s a no-brainer.”