‘I collapsed from meningitis while at Kent University in 2015 - my life changed overnight'
The news of the recent outbreak at the university where Lisa Shoko had studied left her feeling "triggered" but determined to raise awareness about the less talked about effects.
‘I collapsed from meningitis while at Kent University in 2015 - my life changed overnight’
Lisa Shoko was found by her campus flatmate after lying unconscious in her bathroom for hours when the infection took hold of her body. She believes she was the only case at the time.
STORY BY MELISSA SIGODO
APRIL 9, 2026
A former Kent University student who caught meningitis which left her unable to ‘remember patches of her life’ says she felt “triggered” by the recent outbreak on the same campus where she had collapsed years prior.
Lisa Shoko who studied law and lived in student accommodation on the university’s Canterbury campus in 2015 says she was found lying unconscious in her shared bathroom when the infection took hold of her body.
Meningitis is a condition that infects protective membranes which surround the brain and spinal cord and is spread through contact with spit or with a person who has the disease for a prolonged period.
Symptoms include headache, rash, vomiting as well as fever, and if left untreated it can result in concentration and memory problems and in some cases, treatment requires limb amputation to stop infection spreading.
But Lisa, who was a first-year student, says she mistook having a stiff neck for muscle soreness from playing tennis and that she was also prone to migraines.
However, her health took a dangerous turn and the 29-year-old says she then fainted with her hand landing on a hot radiator and she was only found by a flatmate two hours later with a severe fourth-degree burn.
Now, since the outbreak which tragically killed two students at the same university she attended, Lisa says she has been “struggling” with the news and that she is still dealing with cognitive impairment from the disease 10 years later.
Speaking exclusively to The Community Reporter, Lisa who works as an anti-racism lead said:
“I’ve really struggled with hearing about the students at Kent who died from meningitis because I think it is really, really close to home.
“It could have been me without any exaggeration. I also think of their families as well and this idea that you send someone to school and they’re absolutely fine and then they’re not. It’s extremely triggering.”
Lisa says she dismissed her own symptoms and that one minute she was at university and the next moment she was waking up in hospital where she was forced to fight through a month-long health battle.
She said: “I did not have a fever. I was not vomiting but I was nauseous. But if you think about nausea, neck stiffness, sensitivity to light, the headache - all of those could also be migraine symptoms.
“I must have gone to sleep and woken up to go to the bathroom. That’s when I passed out. My hand fell on the radiator and the radiators were on.
“The next thing that I properly remember was seeing my mum, and she’s saying, ‘welcome back.’
“It was extremely scary because I was like, ‘what is she doing here?’.”
The 29-year-old says she was admitted to Kent and Canterbury Hospital where she was in an out of consciousness for three days while staff struggled to diagnose her.
She says that it was only when an international doctor intervened after recognising her symptoms from his work abroad that she was finally diagnosed with Meningitis B.
The doctor had advised staff to perform a lumbar puncture which is where a needle is inserted into the spine to identify if symptoms are caused by a brain condition.
Lisa says she still remembers the look of “relief” on the medical team’s faces when she fully regained consciousness despite the significant delay in treating the disease which can result in needing amputation or loss of life.
However, her ordeal was far from over and after receiving antibiotics for the infection, Lisa says her body became “unpredictable” and she went on to develop sepsis, extremely low blood pressure, fluid accumulating around her heart which later caused her breathing difficulties.
The former Kent University student said: “I was hospitalised for a month.
“I was just at the point of resignation. I was so tired. I was in so much pain. I had lost an extreme amount of weight. I had no appetite. I just felt like I was going to die.”
Lisa says she decided to use the little energy she had to study while in hospital but despite her determination, she realised the meningitis infection had severely affected her brain function making it impossible to read for more than half an hour.
Lisa said: “I told my mom, ‘if I'm going to be here, then you might as well bring me my books. I'm going to study. I'm going to use this time.’
“I remember I must have read something for 30 minutes. I struggled through it.”
Lisa says she finally had a breakthrough when she began to recover from the physical complications from the infection.
But although she was discharged from hospital, she says she was left still coming to terms with the cognitive effects of the disease which “broke her.”
Lisa said: “I had extremely poor memory retention. Poor long-term memory or shorter memory. I have patches of my life that I cannot remember as the result of this.
“I was a public speaker. I was a debater. I’d never had a stammer before. I came out with a significant stammer and a significant lack of confidence and an inability to trust myself.
“That was very damaging for me because there was no support. It broke me.”
Lisa says the cognitive effects of the disease are rarely mentioned but in her experience, she had to “completely reimagine her life” as a result of it.
She said: “People commonly talk about limb loss being one of the outcomes of having meningitis and I think the difficulty can be that you can actually acquire learning disabilities but those are unseen.
“Think about someone who’s brazen enough to study law, right? There’s a general capability around reading, around intensity which completely disappeared almost overnight. I had to completely reimagine what my life was going to be like.”
But Lisa says that despite the immense challenge of rebuilding her life as a student, she continued to pursue her degree while fighting a silent battle of regaining her cognitive abilities and living life which now ‘lacked context.’
She said: “I remember being very reliant on people around me for accuracy. Jokes have been really extremely difficult for me to process. I can’t tell if what you’re saying is a joke or what you’re saying is serious. I’ve lost the context.
“[Even with relationships], I’m almost at what would be at the starting point in the relationship, and for [my friends] they’re like 10 years deep. So, when we meet each other, and they meet me with excitement or expectation or anything like that, [I behave a certain way], not because I’m an unfriendly person or I don’t want to interact or engage with them, but because I lack context.”
But against the odds, Lisa completed university and spent a year in China as part of the course.
She achieved a 2:1 International Legal Studies degree and went on to complete a Socio-Legal Studies Master’s degree.
With all she endured, the anti-racism lead says she has been raising awareness about meningitis, even climbing Mount Kilimanjaro for the Meningitis Research Foundation.
Since then, Lisa says she’s been able to find support for people who have experienced brain injuries which she wishes she would have known about in hospital.
But now, she says that she hopes universities can raise awareness around meningitis as she worries students are more vulnerable to catching the disease due to their enviroment, and can sometimes live in ensuite accommodation where there’s less of a chance of being found by flatmates the same way she was discovered.
Kent University told The Community Reporter that during the recent outbreak, it contacted students who were identified as close contacts by door-knocking and through email as well as providing information on how to be fast-tracked for treatment. They added that they are continuing to do so.
The UK Health Security Agency says that approximately 300 to 400 cases of meningitis are diagnosed in England every year and that the recent outbreak in Kent was likely due to factors such as “close and prolonged contact” between young adults and “behaviours that increase bacterial sharing” as well as “characteristics of the outbreak strain, alongside variable immunity and other factors.”
Lisa says she had been vaccinated but according to the Meningitis Research Foundation, although there are vaccines for the most common forms of the disease which significantly reduce infection, there aren’t vaccines to prevent against all strains.
Overall, Lisa says she wants people to know there is life after meningitis and even after all she went through she hopes she can inspire others who have suffered cognitive impairment to feel seen and to know that they can start over one day at a time.