How teen's dream to be a doctor turned into a medical nightmare just one week into university

A high-achieving teenager, whose HSC marks put her in the country’s top one per cent of year 12 students, has revealed how a debilitating illness nearly crushed her lifelong dream of becoming a doctor.

With an ATAR score of 99.1 to her name, Grafton's Lucy Bindon packed up her belongings and moved to Sydney to study medicine at the University of NSW in February.

But just one week into a grueling six-year degree, the 18-year-old’s life was thrown into turmoil by a deadly strain of meningococcal disease.

After falling ill one Sunday evening, Lucy drove over to her cousin’s house who just happens to live with a doctor.

“When I started to go downhill further, she took me into St Vincent’s but they just thought it was gastritis and said I was fine to go home,” Lucy told Yahoo7 News.

“We decided it would be safer for me to stay the night in hospital.”

Had it not been for that decision, the teenager admits she may have not survived.

“I remember waking up at 3am with a raging fever, I don’t remember much after that,” she added.

Doctors had given Lucy medication to help deal with her “raging stomach cramps”, unaware of the meningococcal septicaemia attacking her immune system.

Lucy, who was vaccinated against some strains of the disease, said she may have died had that medication not also treated some of the symptoms of her illness.

“I have been told that the meningococcal rash began to appear at 8am," she said.

Doctors placed the McAuley Catholic College graduate in an induced coma for seven days.

Weak and disoriented, once she woke up Lucy said her first concern was returning to university.

But it was during this month-long stint in ICU and hospital that her passion for medicine began to fade away.

"Because I had been in a coma, I had lost about 80 per cent of my muscle.

"I couldn't walk, I had to learn how to walk again.

"I never wanted to go back to a hospital again, I didn't want to go back to studying medicine.

Returning to univeristy, Lucy opted to study electives rather than her initial subjects and was determined not to take 12 months to regain full strength.

"They said it would take a year but I'm not the kind of person who just waits around," she said.

It was during this while returning normality to her demanding lifestyle that she began to discuss her future.

"I realised it has given me a lot of life experience, it's given me an insight into what it's like to be on the other end [as a patient].

With the ambition to become a doctor well and truly returned, Lucy is urging everyone to ensure they are immunised against all strains of the deadly disease.

"It is preventable, this doesn't have to happen to you," she told Yahoo7 News.