THE New Year will be a whole lot brighter for brave little Taysha Foster and her doting family.

A cloud of gloom hung over them in late summer when the high-spirited three year-old Leigh girl contracted meningitis.

Within eight hours of complaining of feeling unwell at home in Kenilworth Grove, Higher Fold, she lay at death's door in hospital.

Now her gran Marlene Foster of Westgate Drive, Astley, reveals how doctors gave her just two hours to live after she was diagnosed as having contracted meningitis.

"They stabilised her condition and then, after a worrying five days, she gradually improved. She's a spirited little girl and that seems to have pulled her through," said Mrs Foster.

At Alder Hey Hospital, Liverpool, surgeons battled to save her legs which, in spite of skin graft operations, bear the horrific scars of the crippling tissue-rotting disease.

Taysha's parents Howard and Marie kept a live-in vigil at Alder Hey.

Her relieved father got the best 30th birthday present anyone could wish for when a brain scan gave Taysha the thumbs-up for a brighter future.

And now chatty little Taysha is darting around with her brother Howard, 7, as if nothing had ever happened.

That she could do so was the best possible present for her family this Christmas and their New Year wishes go with the hospital teams which saved her at Wigan and Alder Hey.

"They were magic, but for them she wouldn't be here," said her grateful gran.

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