When Martine Purdy’s 11-year-old son had a high temperature, she put it down to the chest infection he was recovering from.

It was March 2024, and Franki was also struggling with tiredness and a lack of appetite — by the evening, he had a scorching temperature.

But when 51-year-old Martine went into Franki’s room the next morning, she had a gut feeling that something was wrong.

Laying eyes on her son, she was horrified to see his fingers were ‘bent backwards,’ and a faint murmuring sound was coming out of his mouth.

Martine screamed Franki’s name, but she couldn’t wake him up.

The makeup artist says: ‘I couldn’t rouse him; it was like he was on a different planet.

‘I didn’t know this at the time, but he had already had two seizures, his right lung had collapsed, and he’d had a stroke.’

When the paramedics arrived, they attempted to get Franki into the ambulance, but in his state of confusion, he thought he was being kidnapped.

Then, when he arrived at the hospital, doctors placed him in an induced coma and confirmed that he had swelling on his brain.

Franki was then diagnosed with a life-threatening form of bacterial meningococcal meningitis with sepsis, called meningoencephalitis.

The condition occurs when there’s inflammation on the brain and the protective membranes that surround it and the spinal cord at the same time.

‘It was the most horrific sight you could imagine, he was hooked up to all of these wires, and there were machines breathing for him,’ Martine, who lives in Nottingham, shares.

‘The doctors said it was really lucky that Franki was fighting, as it can be fatal. They said he only had an hour to live when the ambulance got to him.’

From that point onwards, Martine and Franki’s dad, Luke, stayed in the hospital with him each and every night.

When doctors first tried to wake Franki from his coma, he was so distressed, that he was sedated again. The second time, while he came round, he was unable to open his eyes, and was ‘crying with fear’.

But across the course of that month, Franki underwent gruelling treatment, learn to walk, talk, eat and even swallow again.

Nineteen months after his illness, Franki’s only just getting back to school.

But even now, he’s still suffering the repercussions of his stroke, and he forgets about conversations almost immediately, so he struggles to keep up.

Franki needs extra help getting washed and dressed, and sometimes still needs to use the wheelchair he was given during his immediate recovery. He also lost patches of his hair, and he still experiences severe headaches.

Now 13, Franki has no memory of the incident, and throughout his time on the hospital ward, he had confabulation nightmares — nightmares he thought were real — where he believed he had staples in his face.

Martine says it was ‘horrible watching him go from a lively boy to a shadow of himself.’

But while Franki’s recovery is ongoing, the family hold onto hope.

‘The road is long, and we have been through hell, so we are determined to go as slowly as is needed to get Franki strong again,’ said Martine.

While he was in hospital, Martine decided to write a story that reimagined Franki’s experience.

The plot is centred around his body being in a coma, but his mind being in a mythical forest, where he met talking animals that were encouraging him to be strong.

She ended up publishing the story as part of a book called The Forest of Remembering, intended to help others understand brain injuries, and to serve in solidarity with people who have suffered from similar illnesses.

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