I Was Four Years Old When Measles Collapsed My Left Lung

by Kelly

I was four years old when measles collapsed my left lung. But my family has many stories of illnesses that are now prevented by vaccines.

In the late fall of 1918, my grandma’s two oldest brothers went to get their Army draft physicals at a military camp in eastern Washington. Two days later, they were both dead, and most of the family was sick. That’s why, when annual influenza vaccines first became available in the 1970s, she insisted that we all get them.

But that’s not my story of an illness that is now mitigated by a vaccine.

In 1954, my aunt spent nine months in an iron lung. Polio left her with one leg shorter than the other, and she suffered from post-polio syndrome later in life. She made a point of explaining to us how lucky we were to have the Salk vaccine as we stood in line at the county health office for our shots.

But that’s not my story of an illness now prevented by a vaccine.

When I was four years old, we went to the zoo. I remember feeding the giraffe and thinking to myself how much his rough, purple-gray tongue felt like my cat’s. Two weeks later, I had the measles. A trip to a zoo full of kids was all it took—the most contagious viral disease we know found me. And my little brother.

I had to wear sunglasses because the doctor worried about blindness as a complication. I remember calamine lotion, oatmeal baths, and oven mitts taped to my hands so I wouldn’t scratch the rash. After a while, my brother got better.

I got pneumonia.

I remember being so hot I couldn’t stand it and feeling like I was drowning. There were bright lights overhead and a terrible, tearing pain in my left side. When I woke up, I was in an oxygen tent covered in little beads of condensed water. Everyone looked like they were glittering. The night nurse was kind. She left my room door open so I could listen to Elvis and the Supremes on her radio.

My left lung had collapsed. I needed a chest tube. I’m 66 now, and I still remember how that tube felt going in. It’s the worst pain I’ve ever felt — perhaps because I was so little, and it was so frightening.

It took a long time to recover. Over the next few years, it seemed I got sick every time something was going around. We now know, of course, that measles depresses the immune system for a surprisingly long time.

Measles vaccine became widely available two years later, when I was in first grade. I remember lining up in the gym to get the shots.

I later developed asthma, and have had issues with lung function since. There’s scar tissue on that left lung, both from the pneumothorax and from subsequent cases of pneumonia. Whenever I get a cold, it turns into asthmatic bronchitis, and I get a pleurisy — which means I can feel the lung and scar tissue rubbing against my ribs when I breathe. Pneumonia cost me two months of 8th grade and a whole semester of my sophomore year in college. My colds turned into bronchitis and then pneumonia so often that I could immediately recognize what was happening and get myself to the doctor for treatment. When the pneumonia vaccine first became available, you can bet I jumped on it.

I had my measles titers checked at my last physical because of recent outbreaks. When my pulmonologist thought a booster wouldn’t hurt, I said, “Jab away!”

The thing is, lung complications are easily the best of the bad outcomes from measles. There’s a particular measles-caused meningitis complication that kills children or leaves them brain damaged. Gratefully, that’s not a complication that found me. Knowing what could have happened puts my lifetime of inhalers in perspective.

Please choose prevention and vaccinate your children. Not only can today’s vaccines provide immunity or mitigate worst-case scenarios for childhood diseases, they can also protect against some cancers. There are generations of gravestones in every old cemetery that testify to what these diseases can do. Let’s vaccinate—to make sure our kids get to be healthy kids.

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