Advocate Profile, Katie Mayberry-Hauser

Kaitie (Mayberry) Hauser was a Freshman College Student at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, PA when she contracted meningococcal meningitis in 1996. She actually contracted the disease while on Spring break and staying at Arizona State University but presented a few days later while returning for the spring semester to her college in Allentown. Her symptoms started out like the flu…fever, migraine, vomiting, and a strange purple rash. The Doctors at the ER thought she had Toxic shock Syndrome or the Chicken Pox and they were going to send her back to the dorm. Had they done that, she would never have survived. Within 24 hours of symptom onset and a few hours after arriving at Sacred Heart Hospital, she was fighting for her life as her heart stopped and her organs shut down. She was placed in a medically induced a coma, was on a ventilator, and given her last rites. Her family was flown in from Illinois. She was given less than 1 % chance of survival.

Kaitie spent the next 11 days in the hospital, and miraculously survived this disease with no physical residual effects. Hauser finished college, and pursued her dreams of theater by getting involved with several different theater companies in Illinois on the stage and behind the scenes. She was married in the the Fall of 2008 and currently works in the insurance industry in marketing and client relations. Hauser was introduced to NMA in the summer of 2008, when a NMA MOM read a story about her that was printed in the local paper in Connecticut where she attended High School.