Mother Turns Grief Over Loss of Her Son into Action About Vaccination

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National Immunization Awareness Month

Mother Turns Grief Over Loss of Her Son into Action About Vaccination

By Dennis Thompson
HealthDay Reporter

(HealthDay News) -- Evan Bozof called home from college, complaining of a bad headache, so bad he'd become violently nauseated.

"Migraines run in my husband's family. Evan had never had one, but it wasn't outside the realm of possibility," said his mother, Lynn Bozof, of Marietta, Ga.

It was 1998, and Evan was a 20-year-old junior at Georgia Southwestern State University in Americus, a pre-med student and a pitcher on the school's baseball team.

"He felt so sick, he wasn't even going to go to his baseball game, and he never, ever missed a baseball game," his mother recalled. "We told him if he wasn't feeling better in five or six hours, have his roommate drive him to the emergency room."

Evan followed his parents' advice. The hospital's doctors told him he had a virus and decided to keep him overnight.

"The next morning, I called the hospital about 6:30 or 7, when I got to work," Lynn said. "I asked to be connected to Evan's room. The nurse came back and said he's too sick to talk. She held the phone up to his ear, and he asked to be brought home."

But before Lynn could even get in touch with her husband to make plans to drive over, she got a call back from the hospital. Evan had been admitted to the intensive-care unit with bacterial meningitis and had a 5 percent or 10 percent chance of survival.

The on-call doctor had examined Evan just after his mother hung up the phone and had found the telltale purple rash that indicates meningitis, Lynn said.

"Really, your mind just can't absorb what is happening," she said. "They tell you if he lasts 48 hours, he should be fine, and you just start looking at your watch, clicking off each half hour."

Evan's parents drove down to the hospital, three hours away, and found their son on oxygen, struggling to breathe. "He told my husband it took every ounce of energy to roll over," Lynn said.

Evan lived past the 48-hour mark, but his health continued to falter.

Over the next 26 days, he was moved to two other hospitals as doctors tried to save him, but the disease ate away at him bit by bit.

He had both arms and both legs amputated due to gangrene caused by the disease. "If he'd survived, he would have needed a kidney transplant," Lynn said. "He had eight hours of seizures that couldn't be stopped and caused irreversible brain damage."

In the end, his parents had to make the decision to have him disconnected from life support.

"It was shortly after that that we learned a vaccine had been around for about 20 years for meningococcal meningitis," Lynn said. "We sent our son off to college; he had everything that was recommended on his matriculation form. We thought he'd be safe."

The Bozofs have since gone on to help found the Meningitis Foundation of America, to help spread the word of the vaccine and treatments for the disease that claimed their son's life.

"We felt other families would be out there in the same situation, and we wanted to help," Lynn said.