I tend to shy away from highly controversial subjects in such a public forum. I’m always up for a good discussion about most things, but I realize I can be easily misunderstood in this format.
{And this is NOT normally the type of post I put on this blog. If you want to see what kind of beneficial things we usually talk about around here, click HERE and I hope you’ll join this incredible community}
Regardless, I feel the need to share a few things we learned from our 9 year old daughter having a confirmed case of whooping cough. She has been vaccinated.
It started as a mild cough. Just at night. No big deal. It progressively worsened in the evenings and throughout the night, disrupting her sleep. It continued to get worse, lasting through the night AND day. She had NO fever. No cold symptoms. NO WHOOPING sound when she coughed.
I thought it was allergies. Or maybe asthma. I had a doctor listen to her lungs for signs of asthma. She sounded fine.
After about 3 weeks of this progressively unrelenting cough, I finally took her to her pediatrician. After an initial exam, my doctor said she needed to be tested for whooping cough.
My response “But she’s been vaccinated”.
Because we live in an area where increasing numbers of people are not being vaccinated, and because whooping cough vaccines can start to wear off between the ages of 9 and 11, there was a chance she had it.
So we tested.
(at the beach after she was done with antibiotics but still unable to function much)
The next morning my doctor called first thing and said she indeed had a confirmed case of whooping cough. She missed school for a week while she was on antibiotics. She was also on an inhaler and steroids for her lungs. She had already been going to school for the past TWO WEEKS while she had it because we had NO IDEA it was even a possibility.
The health department called and asked me a bunch of questions. We e-mailed all our friends, family, church members, and entire neighborhood. A lot of people panicked. And rightly so. I answered a LOT of phone calls and e-mails.
Thankfully no one else we had been in contact with got it (as far as we know). We were all lucky.
When the doctor told us she could have the cough for up to 100 days, I teared up. ONE HUNDRED DAYS???
The cough is hard, persistent, and unrelenting. Her biggest complaint was a sore throat from coughing so hard. She coughed so hard she threw up for the first few weeks. She couldn’t breath several times. My husband and I took turns sleeping in the same room with her. That lasted for well over a month.
I remember riding in the car with her during the week she was home from school. She was coughing and coughing and coughing. But she rarely complained. I told her how sorry I was she had to go through this. But I also told her that because of what she was going through, I had the opportunity to teach a lot of people about whooping cough. And dozens of people I knew (adults) went and got their whooping cough booster shots. And because of that, lives would certainly be saved. She smiled at that.
Whooping Cough (also known as pertussis) is not generally fatal to 9 year olds. But it is absolutely fatal to newborns who have not had the chance to get the vaccine as well as immunocompromised individuals. When I first found out my daughter had it, I was sick to my stomach about who we may have exposed. What if I had a newborn in my home? What if we had been around someone else’s newborn and unknowingly exposed them? Or my neighbor who is immunocompromised?
We did everything we were supposed to do and she still got it.
So. I wanted to share a few things we learned and hopefully stop the spread of whooping cough.
1. Whooping cough is a VACCINE preventable disease. Meaning if we ALL get the vaccine, whooping cough starts to go away.
2. The whooping cough vaccine differs from many other vaccines because it wears off. So you have to keep getting it. Small kids get several rounds of the whooping cough shot. They get it again when they are around 11 or 12 (because it starts to wear off). And ADULTS NEED TO GET A BOOSTER. If you haven’t had one in the last 5 years, you’re due for another one. And if you have any chance of being around a newborn, you NEED to get the booster.
3. Immunizations are not 100% effective. Immunity is not “either/or” but more accurately “more or less”. Meaning you aren’t definitely immune, but the potency will be less if you were to contract the disease. Vaccine’s are designed to increase your immunity to various diseases. And again, if everyone vaccinates, the disease starts to go away.
4. Studies linking autism to vaccine’s need to be looked at with great care. From my understanding and research, they have no validity and many have been explicitly proved wrong. But, coming from a friend who has a child on the autism spectrum as well as a child who died from a vaccine preventable disease, she said she’d take an autistic child over putting a child in the ground any day.
5. No man is an island. Meaning the decisions we all make affect all the people around us. So. If you choose not to vaccinate your children, that is obviously your choice. But it DOES affect all the people around you. If everyone in my community was vaccinated for whooping cough, the disease would essentially leave my community and wouldn’t be an issue. But because many people are choosing not to vaccinate, the disease lingers. And when my kids vaccine starts to wear off, she is susceptible to picking up the disease from the community where it still lingers. Relying on everyone else around you to vaccinate so you don’t have to seems a bit unfair to me. What happens if we ALL stop vaccinating?
6. Whooping cough does indeed last 100 days. And it sucks. BIG TIME. My daughter literally coughed for at least 100 days. And it lingered even longer than that when she did anything active. Like run 10 feet. She’d burst into coughing fits. Did I say it sucks? It does. Bad. I can’t even imagine how horrifying it would have been if she were at risk for death.
7. Whooping cough does NOT ALWAYS HAVE THE WHOOPING SOUND. My daughter did not whoop when she coughed. So if you have a persistent cough not associated with asthma or allergies, GET CHECKED.
8. If you have a newborn, KEEP THEM HOME. I know it’s SO hard to stay home, but infants can’t get their first whooping cough vaccine until they are 8 weeks old. If you can keep them home as much as possible until at least then (and even longer if possible), I highly recommend you do. And don’t feel bad not letting unvaccinated people around your baby. I asked all the adults in my family go get their whooping cough boosters before they were allowed to hold any of my infants. I didn’t feel one bit bad about that.
9. If you have a child between the ages of 9 and 11 and they develop a persistent cough, call your pediatrician. If they say it’s nothing but your parental intuition tells you otherwise, get them checked just to be sure.
Hopefully some of these things we learned will help others with their decisions to vaccinate. I realize it’s not an easy decision and it’s REALLY hard to know what information is accurate on the Internet. I think we all do the best we can with the information we have.
{And please remember that many people will obviously disagree with each other on this subject and think the information they have is truth, but there’s no need to call each other names (you’re stupid, you’re an idiot, you’re a troll, etc. etc.) when we disagree. Please keep the comments kind.}
