Our daughter Lily was a happy and healthy 6 month old baby when our world was turned upside down within a blink of an eye, after she caught a life threatening type of Meningitis 'Meningicocal Septiceamia'.

This all started when we were enjoying a perfectly normal family day out just like everybody else does with no concerns or worries at all, when Lily started to behave strange by shivering from a very high temperature and breathing with a moan, frightened that something was wrong we decided to go to the nearest A&E which was Watford General. During our time there Lily deteriorated, despite this we were sent home at 2:30am after being told she had a virus which could possibly be chickenpox. By the morning Lily was covered in spots, within 20 minutes this erupted to an angry purple rash covering her from head to toe and she was drifting in and out of sleep....

As a precaution we decided to call an Ambulance which on arrival they were very concerned and gave her a Benzylpenicillin injection and rushed her straight to Barnet A&E, where they were expecting us and within minutes she was on a bed with a team of 8 doctors & nurses pumping her with all sorts of fluids & antibiotics with catheters and lines being placed all over her body. Lily was so ill by this stage that in order to save her life they had to sedate her and put her on a ventilator while they waited for the CATS team to come and transfer her to Intensive Care at Great Ormand Street Hospital. No matter how strong you think you are or what you have had to deal with in life nobody can prepare you to hear a specialist doctor tell you that your baby girl might die right here on this table. Within a heartbeat our world stood still and within a very loud busy room all we could see through our blurred vision was this doctor frantically trying to staberlise our baby girl in order to transfer her to Intensive care, not knowing how to react or what to do each minute felt like an hour but as each minute passed we held on to the thought that our baby girl was still alive whilst trying to ignore the fact that any second now we could be told the worst news we could ever possibly imagine. Lily was successfully transferred to G.O.S.H where she spent 5 days in intensive care heavily sedated with a machine breathing for her, these were the longest 5 days of our lives and we lost all sence of reality.

No words can express the feeling we experienced when on the 5th day we heard our baby girl cry as she started to come round and started breathing for herself.

There is no doubt in our mind how close Lily came to loosing her life and we know that if we had decided to accept Watford's diagnosis as our final decision and didn't call an Ambulance Lily would not be here today.

It is with special thanks to the knowlege, fast thinking and precision timing from the amazing Ambulance team, Barnet A&E, CATS & Great Ormand Street Hospital that this story has a happy ending.

We are so happy to announce that apart from a few minor complications our beautiful baby girl Lily has bounced back from this horrible illness and is happy and well and smiling away like nothing has happened!

We will never be able to repay these people for what they have done but we want to make this page in order to raise awareness and throughout the year we will be updating you with fundraising events in order for you to give what you can to this fantastic cause, we hope that you will never have to call on them but it is without doubt that during the time of you reading this post they will be attempting to save another child's life.