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Far 2 Fabulous
Join Catherine & Julie, your feisty hosts at Far 2 Fabulous, as they lead you on a wellness revolution to embrace your fabulousness.
Julie, a Registered Nutritional Therapist with over 20 years of expertise, and Catherine, a former nurse turned Pilates Instructor and Vitality Coach, blend wisdom and laughter seamlessly.
Off the air, catch them harmonising in their local choir and dancing to 80's hits in superhero attire. Catherine braves the sea for year-round swims, while Julie flips and tumbles in ongoing gymnastics escapades.
With a shared passion for women's health and well-being, they bring you an engaging exploration of health, life, and laughter. Join us on this adventure toward a more fabulous and empowered you!
Far 2 Fabulous
Podcasthon Charity Special. From Heartbreak to Hope: A Personal Journey with Meningitis Now
Episode 62
The unexpected call to action arrived one January day when meningitis claimed my beautiful niece Mia on her 20th birthday. What began as seemingly ordinary flu-like symptoms rapidly evolved into an unimaginable tragedy, forever changing our family and igniting a passionate mission to raise awareness about this devastating disease.
Meningitis is deceptive because its early symptoms mirror common illnesses—fever, headaches, stiff neck, and nausea. By the time distinctive signs appear, like the non-fading rash detected by the glass test, critical moments have often passed. This special charity podcasthon episode breaks down what meningitis is, how bacterial forms like Meningitis B can rapidly become life-threatening, and why the speed of treatment represents the greatest chance for survival and recovery.
From our darkest moments emerged "Team Meebs," a formidable group of family and friends who transformed grief into purpose. We've run marathons, organized winter balls, hosted silent discos, and built a community dedicated to supporting Meningitis Now—the UK's largest meningitis charity providing critical helplines, counselling, financial assistance, and research funding. Together, we've raised almost £50,000, but more importantly, we've created a network of strength around those suffering similar losses while amplifying a message that could save lives: know the symptoms, trust your instincts, and advocate fiercely when seeking medical attention.
Whether you've been personally affected by meningitis or simply want to protect your loved ones, sharing this awareness could mean the difference between life and death for someone in your community. Join us in honoring Mia's memory by spreading knowledge that saves lives—because when it comes to meningitis, minutes matter.
You can find out more about #teammeebs and support our Marathon effort HERE
You can find out more about Meningitis Now HERE
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For more information about Julie Clark Nutrition, click HERE
For more information about Catherine Chapman, click HERE
We look forward to you joining us on the next episode.
Welcome to Far Too Fabulous, hosted by Julie and Catherine. Join us on a mission to embrace your fabulousness and redefine wellness. Get ready for some feistiness, inspiration, candid chats and humour as we journey together towards empowered wellbeing. Let's dive in. Hello, hello, and welcome back to the Far Too Fabulous podcast, and we are interrupting your usual program with a slightly different recording this week. We have decided to take part in something that has been called a podcast-thon. It's for charity, and the idea is that thousands of podcasts all across the world join in this week, releasing themed podcasts around their charities that they support.
Speaker 1:If you have been listening to the Far Too Fabulous podcast for a while, you know that I am a huge supporter of meningitis now and, in fact, such a huge supporter that I am running the London Marathon for them this April, and last year I ran the Brighton Marathon and we raised about £14,000 for them during that time. I'm doing this with a team that we lovingly call Team Meeps fabulous friends that all decided actually one very drunken night on my husband's 50th birthday that would be a really good idea to run a marathon for charity, and we signed up for Brighton there and then and then that was it. The commitment was made, and so this year, 2025, we have got my brother-in-law, alex, and my husband and another friend of ours running the Brighton marathon, and the girls and a boy my husband are doing London marathon this year. So it's going to be me and my sister and Emma and Tash and Jenny and then Mark. Funny thing is that everybody got excited after Brighton Marathon. They all signed up for the ballot for London Marathon. I didn't. I was still fairly determined I was never going to run a marathon again because it was far harder than than I could possibly have imagined, and so I was like, no, I'm never doing that again. And then, obviously, I got swept up in the emotion and the energy of it. Now I'm doing it again. But everybody signed up for the ballot apart from me, and the only person that really wasn't that interested in doing London Marathon was my husband, and it was the first time he'd signed up for the ballot, so of course, he got a place, so he is now doing both, which is an absolutely incredible feat.
Speaker 1:So I want to give you an about what meningitis is and what meningitis now, as a charity, does to combat this devastating infection, and how they support everybody that surrounds this and give you some personal stories along the way. So meningitis is inflammation of the meninges, which is membrane that surrounds the brain and the spinal cord. This can be a bacteria or a virus, and the bacterial version of meningitis is the serious one, the one that is particularly life-threatening. And, as if this story is not grim enough, it goes hand in hand with sepsis, which is the blood poisoning form of the disease, and this often occurs alongside meningitis. So the key symptoms of meningitis are fever, headaches, a stiff neck, a rash that doesn't fade under pressure you know the glass test nausea, vomiting, sensitivity to light, confusion, drowsiness. However, saying that, that covers probably most viruses If you've got a cold, if you've got the flu, you will have one or many of those symptoms. So it's a real tricky one, and often these symptoms don't appear until a little bit further down the line, and I'm not going to say until it's too late, because that isn't always the case, but they don't often show themselves until this infection has really got a hold of you, and so I think the most important thing is to just have the awareness. Things like using the glass and pushing it onto a rash and seeing whether it remains visible under the glass or not, is a good thing to be able to do, knowing that you can pin your chin down towards your chest, and if you can do that and then raise your chin right up to the sky and drop your head back, that that's a good indicator if you're able to do that, and things like light sensitivity. However, don't just rely on those and just listen to your gut, and if you think that there is something more serious going on, then then when you are with the healthcare professionals, just be very, very insistent about it.
Speaker 1:A lumbar puncture is the official way to diagnose if it is meningitis that somebody is suffering from or not. However, from what I've experienced and from what I have heard, often if somebody is so poorly there isn't an opportunity to do that and treatment just needs to be administered as quickly as possible is looking out for those symptoms and really decreasing the amount of time between those symptoms starting and treatment, from the medics starting being aware that this awful infection can infect anybody. I think that maybe it in the past was perhaps associated with babies or with late teens, when they started to go off to university, and that's thankfully where lots of the vaccinations have been having some use. However, it is good to know that it does not discriminate against age and you can get meningitis at any age. So the organization of Meningitis Now's roots trace back to the early 80s, with the formation of groups like Meningitis Research Appeal and the Stroud Meningitis Support Group. These groups were formed by families that were directly affected by meningitis and demonstrated the powerful drive of personal experience in fueling the fight against this disease. So it then became the Meningitis Trust in 1986, and that was the first UK meningitis charity, and then, in 2013, the Meningitis Trust merged with Meningitis UK to create Meningitis Now, which is now the largest UK meningitis charity and a force to be reckoned with.
Speaker 1:So from its early days, the charity has been instrumental in funding research into meningitis, contributing to development and introduction of the vaccines. Their support includes 24-hour helplines, financial grants, counselling services and support groups. So this is not only isolated to patients the person that has or had meningitis but it's about their whole family and helping them with their mental health, helping them with their social health. It's a really comprehensive support system. So obviously, one of their main focuses is on awareness, highlighting and raising the awareness of meningitis symptoms, and they distribute millions of symptoms cards and utilize as many communication channels as they possibly can. And then, like I said, they are a driving force behind the vaccine, behind doing lots of research and being able to roll out immunisation programmes.
Speaker 1:I have mentioned that I am running the London Marathon for them, but they do three peak challenges. There's I think there's one I've just seen that's somewhere across the desert, which I don't know if I should say out loud or on a podcast kind of sparked my interest a little bit. So watch this space. They also do the ribbon appeal as well. They also do the ribbon appeal as well. So they what an incredible feeling is to be with those people.
Speaker 1:Last year not last year now the year before was especially tough because that was the first time that we had been there and it was very, very emotional and very raw and very difficult. And then we went back again in for Christmas 2024 and I was also really really fortunate enough to be able to go there not only with my family but with my choir family that I sing with UK Soul Choirs had been asked to come and perform at the choir service and and I got to sing a solo there as well. So it was, it was really again. It was really, really emotional and an honor to be part of such an incredible service and to be able to be doing as much as we possibly can to support meningitis now, and it's an opportunity for myself and my family to meet other people that have been affected by meningitis and their families, hearing their stories, hearing the stories from survivors, hearing stories from people that have lost their family members, and as painful and as awful as the whole thing is, the support and the encouragement and the positivity and the hope going forward that we can be part of is so, so important. So, for people that don't know me personally and for people that have not listened to the podcast for very long, the reason that meningitis now is such an important charity to myself and my family is that on the 5th of January 2023, we lost my beautiful niece, mia my sister's daughter on her 20th birthday to meningitis.
Speaker 1:She contracted meningitis B. She was over from Dubai where she was living with her boyfriend. She was over for two weeks for Christmas. I mean, thank goodness, I think she'd probably caught something on the plane. I think she was probably run down from working and having a fabulous time over in Dubai and then coming over here for Christmas and then catching up with everybody, which she did, and we all had a fabulous Christmas together and spent lots and lots of quality time with her Again, thank goodness. But she was poorly a lot of that time and everybody was in fact, everybody had flus and sickness, bugs and goodness knows what else.
Speaker 1:I think probably still at that point our immune systems were still trying to struggle with being back together with everybody again and there was a lot of illness around and so, as everybody does, you just think it was cold until you, until you don't, until, unfortunately, it got a hold of me, so so quickly that it was. It was too late, very, very quickly and has created and left the biggest hole in our family. She was the most beautiful girl inside and out, an absolute ray of sunshine, and I know that people say that especially about people that have passed, but she was an absolute delight. I can hear her voice. I can hear her little voice when she was younger, when she was strappy. I can hear her voice calling us all and it was an absolute, devastating loss for the whole of the family and we are beyond grateful to have had her for those 20 years.
Speaker 1:King's College Hospital that looked after her in her last few days in her beautiful body, were unbelievably brilliant and supportive. There were a lot of friends and family that wanted to be near Mia and Claire and Alex and Lily, and they were just beyond incredible, and so and we do raise money for them as well, and we do intend to continue to support them as well, because they do absolutely incredible work Meningitis Now, right from the get-go, have been an incredible support for my sister and her family and, unfortunately, thousands of families that have either lost their loved ones or that are survivors of meningitis and need the charity's support in all sorts of ways. And, of course, we would have Mia back with us in the splittest of seconds if that was ever ever possible, which we unfortunately, we know is not and so the next best thing for us as a family has been to channel our loss and our grief into helping this charity with its awareness, with its, and the amazing thing that it has done for us all, as well as giving us a focus, is that it has brought us together. When we trained for Brighton Marathon, it created this group of people that we affectionately now call Team Meebs, and through the training and through the fundraising and any organisation that was required. It brought us all together, it gave us a focus and this year, as we've been raising money for the London Marathon, we decided to do something slightly different. So, rather than just keep sending the link out and saying, give us your money, give us your money, we're running the marathon, give us your money, which actually I've just been told we haven't done at all this year, and it's very hard to find the link, so I will money.
Speaker 1:So in January, we ran a winter ball. We were going to do a Christmas ball because Mia loved Christmas. However, everybody thought probably there was enough going on at Christmas and I think we probably wanted to get past the 5th of January again. Those anniversaries were always particularly tough, and so we had an amazing winter ball. It was just absolutely incredible and we raised about £7,000, which was just incredible. And then last weekend we had a silent disco and we are planning to run a quiz as well. So team meeps has become a formidable event organizing team as well. So we are considering hiring ourselves out. No, we're not. We're not, definitely not. It has helped to bring us together as a community to support one another. It's easy to get lost in the grief and forget that everybody else is grieving as well, and so we can come together and just remember Mia in her own ways, and I'm grateful that these people are around my sister and Alex and Lily and myself and my mum and Nana and Popsie, my fellow auntie, auntie Faye and Uncle Lee and all of the cousins, because if you've ever come across my family, we tend to come en masse, so it is good to have this support wrapped around us.
Speaker 1:I have always enjoyed supporting charities. I've always found it very motivational about oh god, I don't know how many years ago now maybe eight years ago now, seven or eight years ago I did the castle series triathlons. So that was I don't. I'm saying this out loud and I just think it was completely insane and I remember booking it, thinking this is a brilliant idea. So I did five triathlons in five months. So I started in May over in Galway in Ireland and then we did one up near Manchester. We did. I did one up near Manchester, one up near York. Then we went over to I can't remember what it was called somewhere in France Chateau Chantilly or something like that and did one there, and then the final one was at Hever Castle in September and they were all gradually getting longer. So I started off with a super sprint in Galway and I ended up with an Olympic distance in Hever and I did that for Macmillan.
Speaker 1:Now, when I was a nurse at Chelsea and Westminster, we had a Macmillan centre attached to our unit there who used to give the chemotherapy there and they were just absolutely incredible. So it really felt and it was an honour to be able to give back to Macmillan and they have also supported. I know that I feel like everybody has been touched by cancer in one way, shape or form, and as a family there was a point where we had we'd lost an elderly loved one every single year for something like four or five years, and so Macmillan had also supported our family through that. So it felt very good to be able to do a little bit to support them. I've always supported Cancer Research UK. That used to be my go-to charity. We lost my dad when I was 16 to lung cancer, and so being able to support the research into cancers was, or is still, very important, and also, for me, being able to support environmental charities is very close to my heart.
Speaker 1:I work with people. I work with human beings usually female human beings to support their health and their well-being, so I feel like it's a nice balance to be able to then support environmental charities. At the moment, the main thing I get to donate is my time. Lots of that goes towards my work with SOS Whitstable. We are a local organisation that campaign against the sewage pollution in our sea, and so that takes a lot of time and a lot of my energy, which I love putting into, but eventually I would like to create a constant stream of donations through my business to environmental charities as well.
Speaker 1:So as I draw this very special episode of the podcast to a close, I will remind you that, as much as this is, this has been an emotional podcast for me, and I imagine it's been an emotional one to listen to. I should have put a warning out at the beginning Jenny don't drive whilst listening to this podcast. I don't want anybody crying in the car to the point that they can't drive. The biggest thing here is the awareness. So the awareness of the symptoms and knowing that it's the speed in which you can get treatment to the person suffering that is the biggest lifesaver here. So awareness for people that are suffering, awareness for people around and also awareness for healthcare professionals, people in emergency rooms, the ambulance crew that attend these people, to be able to get maybe the anticonvulsants and the antibiotics into these people as soon as possible, to get that treatment going and give them the best chance of initially survival and then, when they survive, that they have not got too many lasting effects from this awful, awful, awful disease. So if you want to do one thing is that you share this podcast and so that the awareness gets out there.
Speaker 1:If you have been affected by meningitis or sepsis, meningitis Now can support you in so many ways. It's such an incredible charity. The whole Meningitis Now organization are so supportive, so empathetic, so human from their CEO, tom Nutt, and their president, lisa Snowden, who has also had a personal run-in with mening us marathon runners and support us in any way that we can. It's just such an incredible organisation and we are, you know, as much as we don't want to have gone through what we went through to get here, through what we went through to get here. We are incredibly proud to support this organisation and we will continue to do so, probably forever.
Speaker 1:I think you're stuck with us. Sorry, guys, yeah, as I draw a complete close to this very special podcast-thon podcast. It's been an honour to be able to speak out the experiences that we've had, to be able to raise awareness again. I can't say that enough to be able to celebrate the work of meningitis now and just to give a huge shout out, obviously, to my beautiful, beautiful family and to all of our family and friends that are wrapped around us. I love you all. I hope you enjoyed this podcast. I hope that you are not too much of a snotty mess and sending lots of love with your friends and family. You might just change your life. Connect with us on social media and make your life easier by joining our podcast mailing list. You'll find the links in the show notes. Your weekly episode will be delivered straight to your inbox every thursday morning. Make it a fabulous week and we'll catch you in the next episode.