A 31-year-old girl claims she became "obsessed" and began suffering from multiple personality disorder after contracting viral meningitis.
Samantha Vaughn, 31, says her family and nurses were shocked when she developed a split personality a few hours after becoming ill. According to her family members, the woman began to give orders to the nurses, demanded that they hold their hands at the seams, and then began a long and rant, replete with insults. At that moment, the woman was sure that she was the head teacher.
She later left her hospital bed without warning and wandered the hallways like a zombie.
“Samantha seemed to be possessed, it was terrible and very scary. We did not know what was wrong with her, and this unknown was frightening. When we brought Samantha to the hospital, she had a seizure. I had never seen anything like it before, I was so scared. During these periods, she became aggressive and cruel.
She was once the head teacher, and that time when she was an American woman, she even hit me. Waking up at night and not understanding what was happening, she got out of bed and wandered the corridors of the hospital like a zombie. So we had to sit all night in the hospital to look after her,”says her grandmother Vicki Vaughn.
The young woman suffered from meningoencephalitis, a form of viral meningitis, but doctors were confused because numerous tests turned out to be false negative. Samantha spent three months in the hospital, due to which she developed another disease - heterotopic calcification. This means that she had too much calcium in her body. The disease deprived the girl of the ability to move independently. In order to cope with the new disease and learn to walk again, Samantha needed 6 months of rehabilitation.
“People think meningitis is only dangerous for young children or schoolchildren. But I was 28 when I got sick. I fell ill shortly after I returned from Egypt, where I spent my vacation with my sister and aunt. After returning home, I started having severe headaches, dizziness, and my speech at times became slurred,”says Samantha Vaughn.
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The doctors could not explain why the girl suffered from a split personality. They suggested that since the brain suffers from meningitis, it may be a manifestation of the disease. However, such cases have not yet been documented.
“I had to completely rebuild my life after my illness. I had to learn to walk again. I will have to use crutches for a long time. I also have cognitive difficulties. My short-term memory is so bad that I have to write everything down in order not to forget anything, and I also have problems concentrating. I have also become very sensitive to noise,”she said in an interview.
The girl told her story at the conference "Viral Meningitis Week", in an attempt to raise awareness of this terrible disease.