Saima Herz, a newly married girl woke up one chilly Friday morning and felt she has a fever and headache.
Saima Herz thought she had the flu.
She worked as a nursery manager, she went to her GP on the way home from work. And, she was advised to rest and take paracetamol, it was assumed that she had a winter bug.
She spent the weekend while resting on the sofa, sipping hot lemon, and her loving husband Mike made soup for her.
A few days later, on December 17, this healthy and young woman died, unfortunately.
The cause of her death was encephalitis, inflammation of the brain. The few symptoms include headache, fever and, most notably, confusion.
Saima’s husband, Mike, now wants to raise awareness of the condition. 6,000 people get affected each year in the UK, claiming as many as 1,800 lives. For Mike, losing his wife after just two months of marriage is the worst feeling.
In 2002, when Mike was 12, he lost his mother, Jane, 37, and brother, Ben, nine, in a car accident. He and his father, Adam, got minor injuries but survived.
‘As soon as I met this funny, beautiful woman, I knew she could heal me,’ reflects Mike, a businessman from Cheshire. ‘Within minutes of our first date, I knew I wanted to be with for the rest of my life.
‘I don’t even have the words to describe what has happened. It’s a joke, a horrible, incredible, unfathomable joke.’
‘I raced over to the nursery,’ says Mike. ‘When I saw Saima, my first thought was that she’d had a stroke or an allergic reaction.
‘I helped her into the car as she could barely walk straight. I talked to her as we drove to the hospital, but she wasn’t making any sense.
‘She practically collapsed in my arms as I took her into A&E. Then she started having a fit as doctors surrounded her, the most awful thing I’ve ever seen.’
‘I remember one doctor saying he thought it was encephalitis, but I shouldn’t worry,’ says Mike. ‘Saima, he said, was young and fit, and should make a full recovery. I desperately clung to that hope.’
‘The specialist slowly explained that Saima was the most poorly person in the whole intensive care unit,’ says Mike. ‘When they said that I knew she was going to die.
‘I just sat by my wife’s bed urging her to stay alive, telling her how much I loved her.’
Saima’s heart was failing, the condition when the brain swells it pushes downwards onto the brainstem, the part which controls breathing and circulation, stopped working. Doctors told him that now she could alive only on life support machines.
‘At that moment, everything froze,’ says Mike. ‘I closed my eyes and pictured the woman that Saima had been. Our wedding, our honeymoon in Mauritius. Just our day-to-day life. ‘I’d been frantically reading about encephalitis online and saw how some people had been left brain-damaged. I knew it was time to let her go.
‘But before I did anything I rang my dad. My mom had been in Saima’s situation, on life support after the accident, and I asked him if he’d stayed in the room when they switched the machine off.
‘He said he couldn’t do it and had regretted it ever since. At that point, I went back into the room, kissed my wife gently on the head, held her and told her I would make her proud. Then the machine fell silent and she slipped away.
‘It was only about a week since she had fallen ill. I’d had no time to process what was going on. My pain was so intense; I was even too numb to cry.’ Hundreds of mourners attended Saima’s funeral and she was buried in her wedding dress.
‘Saima always said she wanted to wear it again one day,’ reflects Mike, with sadness. ‘So that’s what she did. And I asked all the ushers from our wedding to walk her coffin to her grave.’
Mike, decided to do something about this to raise awareness.
On April 24 and 26 next year, he will take a three-day ride, he decided to cycle more than 200 miles from his wedding venue to London’s Buckingham Palace. 30 other riders will join him, friends, family and many people who knew Saima and want to help promote her legacy.
‘For example, the measles virus is a major cause of brain infection, and this is why it is so tragic that people are not getting vaccinated. Encephalitis can also be caused by some mosquito-borne viruses, in Asia, Japanese encephalitis causes about 70,000 cases a year. Again this is preventable with vaccination.’
‘My wife, my mom and my little brother were the most unbelievable people. I don’t know anyone who didn’t adore them.
‘I need people to know how dangerous encephalitis is and how vital it is to get to the hospital if something is wrong.
‘To help other people is the best way to remember those I have loved so much and who I miss so badly.’
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