THERE is a scar running halfway across Stewart Brown's head, it is ragged and angry and snakes from his crown down towards his left ear.
The bottle that caused it left him fighting for life, saved by the skill of a surgeon who peeled back his scalp and inserted four metal pins into his skull.
Five months on from the vicious attack and, on the surface at least, those physical wounds may be healing.
But the psychological scars of a brutal attack while he was still adjusting to his little boy's tragic death from meningitis and the subsequent court hearing that highlighted failings within NHS 24, those scars go much deeper.
He runs his finger along the line of the wound and tries to make sense of the past two years. Before April 2006, Stewart had a partner, Lisa, and lived with their daughter Chantelle and their healthy young son Kyle in a comfortable family home. He didn't know what meningitis was – or how cruelly and swiftly it would eventually destroy his life.
Nor could he ever have imagined that one day he – dyslexic, unqualified and a self-proclaimed "bit of a lad" – would competently represent his grieving family in a court hearing, confronting a learned QC over complicated medical papers.
Today, with his family life in tatters – his relationship with Lisa couldn't sustain the pressure of burying a child – his son dead and a head injury that has left his plans to raise funds in Kyle's memory in tatters, Stewart is only too aware of the misery meningitis has brought to his door.
It all sounds too much for one man to bear. Yet Stewart slips a baseball cap over his head to hide the scars and insists that amid all the misery and pain, the grief and the sometimes overwhelming anger, he's emerged a better, stronger and more caring man.
"All this has changed me," he says, in a voice little more than a whisper. "Everything that has happened has made me see things differently.
"I believe Kyle has turned me into a man rather than the boy I was. Losing him has made me open my eyes up to the world. I see everything a lot clearer now.
"I used to be one of the lads, I had my moments – plenty of them," he continues. "But I'm not the Stewart that I used to be.
"For a start, if what happened to Kyle hadn't happened, then I would never have known about meningitis. He has given me the urge to do more about it so other people can know what it can do. I want to help them."
Which makes the brutal attack in January – over which no-one has been charged – so tragic. Driven by a desire to keep his son's memory alive, to raise awareness of meningitis and give back something to the charity that handed him and Lisa the money they needed for a headstone, Stewart, 33, had great plans for a fundraising campaign.
Now that dream is all but over, after a thug smashed a bottle over the back of his head as he tried, drunk but well-intentioned, to break up someone else's fight.
"I was drunk and I was walking home at around two in the morning," remembers Stewart. "Lisa and I had split up – we were arguing all the time by then and I wonder now if that was because she kept seeing Kyle in me.
"I saw someone arguing and I just padded in to try to stop it. I couldn't help myself, that's the kind of thing I do. I knew I'd been hit from behind and it was a bottle. But that's all I can remember."
Bleeding and stunned, he stumbled home on a badly injured ankle – he's still not sure how his leg was injured. Later, he arrived at hospital where surgeons carried out emergency surgery to his fractured skull.
"They said that I could have died. But I've lost that fear and worry about death that I had before. I would be happy to die – although I'd never want to leave my daughter, I'd do anything to be back with Kyle.
"I believe he's out there and that he's come back to me. Sometimes I feel this chill, freezing cold, down my side and it's like he's here."
Kyle was only 20 months old when he died in Stewart's arms, his tiny body blackened by septicaemia. Hours earlier, Lisa, 32, had called NHS 24 to appeal for help as her son's condition deteriorated and a purple rash appeared over his body, only to wait more than 40 minutes for a call back to be told her sick son should go by taxi to the ERI.
Later it would emerge in a Fatal Accident Inquiry hearing at Edinburgh Sheriff Court that the dying child had been given a "priority two" listing within the controversial service's callback system – which meant vital minutes were lost in getting him attention that might have saved his life.
As Kyle's condition worsened, another NHS worker decided that although Kyle could well have been developing meningitis, his condition was not "immediately life-threatening" and ruled out sending an ambulance.
Why there was no ambulance was among the first questions on Stewart's lips when he arrived at the Sick Kids to see his son. If he got a reply to his question, he can't remember. For the looks on the medical staff's faces told him all he needed to know.
"He was probably already dead by then and they were just keeping him going a bit on the life support," he remembers. "I went in saying I wanted an investigation – why did they send a sick boy a taxi that couldn't go through red lights and that took him to the ERI?
"I got there knowing Kyle had something badly wrong but I didn't think he was going to die. The nurses didn't have to say much, it was obvious what was happening to him," he adds.
Doctors prepared the couple as best they could. "One doctor said it was the worst case of meningitis she had seen in 15 years," remembers Stewart. "I had to accept he was going to die.
"I said to Lisa that there was no point in him going through more pain. Lisa handed him to me and I was holding him when he died."
Stewart closes his eyes tightly and bites hard on his lip to keep his composure. Losing Kyle will affect him for the rest of his life.
"He was 10lb 4oz when he was born, he was a healthy wee boy who hadn't been ill," he remembers. "I'd wanted a boy – we had Chantelle when Lisa was still just 18 – and I was over the moon when he arrived. I loved that bairn.
"You grieve for all the things that have been lost – like the birthdays and the first day at school, going to the football together.
"You can't understand why He (God] takes the young ones who haven't had their lives yet. That's what's hard."
Every week he visits Rosebank cemetery to spend time by Kyle's grave. "We put wee bricks around the grave to make a wee garden – we had some lights but they were stolen," he says.
"We've made it nice for him. I think there's a wee squirrel comes down and messes things up sometimes. Kyle would like that – I can imagine him trying to catch it. When the anniversary dates come around, me, Lisa and Chantelle all go there together and it's like we're a family again. I miss that."
Stewart has signed up for the Great Wee Scottish Walk in Edinburgh in June and is looking for sponsors to help him raise money for the Meningitis Research Foundation.
It's a long way from the hard man image he once had, from the unemployed occasional drug user prone to angry outbursts to charity worker and meningitis campaigner trying to run his own cleaning business.
And it's thanks, he says, to Kyle. "What happened opened my eyes to everything.
"Kyle is gone, but he has opened up my world."
DISEASES HIT 3000 A YEARMENINGITIS and septicaemia affect about 3000 people every year in the UK and Republic of Ireland.
This works out at just over eight every day, but there are more cases in winter than in summer.
Anyone can get the diseases, but babies, children and young adults are most at risk.
One in ten people who get meningitis and septicaemia dies and many more are left with disabilities. No other disease kills faster – a healthy person could die in hours.
Meningitis is the inflammation of the lining around the brain and spinal cord. Septicaemia is the blood poisoning form of the disease.
Symptoms can include fever, vomiting and a rash which doesn't disappear when pressed.
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Meningitis Research Foundation: www.meningitis.org. For details of how to sponsor Stewart's Great Wee Scottish Walk, contact sdick@edinburghnews.com.•
The walk takes place on June 6 at Meadowbank. www.greatscottishwalk.com The full article contains 1539 words and appears in Edinburgh Evening News newspaper.
