LOWELL -- After her daughter suffered a debilitating form of viral meningitis seven years ago that left her brain-damaged, Stacy Phillips wants to raise awareness about the deadly disease at the center of a national health scare.

The Lowell mother is urging people to ask medical providers for spinal taps if they think they could have symptoms, in hopes that they can avoid a misdiagnosis like the one that left her 15-year-old daughter, Amber, with lifelong damage.

"Because there are different types of meningitis, you've got to catch it early," Casey Crane, a friend of the Phillips family who has helped spearhead their advocacy campaign, said from the Phillips home Friday. "Left untreated, there are very few recoveries and there is a 1 percent chance of surviving a coma."

Those chances are why Crane and Phillips call Amber a "miracle."

When she was 8 years old, Amber contracted viral meningitis without knowing it. She came down with a headache, a fever and a stiff neck one day in August 2005, and Phillips took her to the Greater Lowell Pediatrics Center. There, a doctor named Michelle Sorensen, now Michelle Lock, told Phillips that Amber's condition was likely a result of allergies and prescribed Flonase. When Phillips asked Lock to take a blood sample in case Amber had meningitis, Lock ruled the disease out, Phillips said.

"She said the blood test wasn't necessary and that it was allergies," Phillips said.


Two days later, Phillips found Amber convulsing in seizures and rushed her to Lowell General Hospital, where doctors detected the meningitis and told Phillips that Amber had suffered a stroke and fallen into a coma. She woke up three weeks later in Boston Children's Hospital, a shell of her former self.

Phillips was told her daughter suffered severe brain damage as a result of the swelling of her brain tissue and would function at the level of a child for the rest of her life. Rendered immobile, she would need to relearn to walk, speak and eat. In the six years since her ordeal, Amber has learned all those basics, but will need assistance for the rest of her life. She is enrolled in special-education classes at Lowell High School, where she is learning to count and bathe.

"Before, she was normal and then she got sick and the doctor messed up," Phillips said as Amber sat beside her with a blank expression on her face, staring off into the distance. "I feel like I lost my little girl."

Attorney Domenic Paolini, who is representing the Phillipses in a medical-negligence lawsuit filed against Lock in Lowell Superior Court, said that had Lock performed a spinal tap on Amber, she could be living a much different life.

"When you see this constellation of symptoms, and the possibility of meningitis is on that list, you have to order a spinal tap," Paolini said from the Phillips home. He said Lock is further at fault of negligence because of information she disclosed on a medical notice she filed with the practice, where she indicated viral meningitis as a possible cause but that there was no evidence of it upon an exam.

That notice has been verified by The Sun. Phillips claims an exam was never performed.

Attorney John Mulvey, who is representing Lock, did not immediately return a call for comment. The juried case is scheduled to begin Oct 29. Lock no longer practices at Greater Lowell Pediatrics.

With the help of Crane, a longtime public figure in Lowell who has started a nonprofit patient-advocacy organization, Phillips and Amber have taken their message of early prevention to the streets. They have spoken at the Coalition for a Better Acre, on a pubic-access TV show, and at a City Council meeting earlier this month, when Mayor Patrick Murphy issued a declaration making October "Meningitis Awareness Month" in honor of Amber.

Meningitis is an inflammation of brain tissue caused by an existing infection traveling into the bloodstream and then the brain. While the viral meningitis Amber contracted and that has also infected a Dracut student is the most common and least dangerous type of the illness, the infection can prove fatal if it spreads too fast, said Lowell Health Department Director Frank Singleton. 

It differs from bacterial meningitis, which is rarer and more likely to cause brain damage. That strain took the life of Bartlett Community Partnership School teacher Melissa Boyd, 40, on Oct. 2. Fungal meningitis, the strain at the heart of a national medical scandal that has seen 15 people die from tainted medicine, is the rarest and most deadly type of the disease.

If left untreated, Singleton said, all three strains can prove devastating. He urged people to head to the doctor as soon as symptoms of a stiff neck, headaches and a fever arise.

"There are multiple causes of meningitis, but the result is the same," Singleton said. "It can cause permanent brain damage and lead to death.

"Once it gets into the brain, very bad things can happen very quickly."