by Ginny Cunningham
No one tells you how extraordinarily brutal whooping cough is on a baby’s body. Episodes started with a small cough that became progressively more violent while my five-week-old daughter’s face turned blue. Then came several seconds of silence while she struggled for breath. That’s when you pray—pray to hear the famous “whoop” when her breath returns.
It took thirty-three hours of labor, but we were so thrilled when our daughter, Paige, was born healthy with a beautiful shock of dark hair, a petite little nose, and rosebud lips. We couldn’t wait to take her home. The next couple of weeks were stressful due to frustration with breastfeeding. Worried she wasn’t getting enough to eat, at three weeks old we took her to the pediatrician to be weighed. While waiting, my husband and I noticed two active, older kids coughing quite a bit. I tried to cover our daughter with her blanket to protect her.
After examination, the pediatrician assured me she was thriving normally.
A few days later I heard her cough. I remember thinking it didn’t sound like the newborn’s cough we had been told to expect. This sounded different. As days went on, the cough got progressively worse, as did her physical well-being. In the next two weeks, we made two trips to the pediatrician, who diagnosed her with a random respiratory infection. On our third trip, a doctor who had worked at the border during his time in the military thought he recognized whooping cough. He tested her for it.
Then the words I’ll never forget: “The results of the tests we ran on Paige came back and she’s positive for whooping cough.”
Whooping cough? I didn’t think people got that anymore. Concerned, I grabbed my parent’s bible, What to Expect the First Year. I read that whooping cough can be fatal, especially to infants. My heart dropped to the floor. Our daughter wasn’t even an infant yet; she was a five-week-old newborn.
A week in the isolation room at the local hospital followed. Days were solely focused on the dreaded whooping cough episodes; they happened every four hours. At the first cough, I was instructed to hit the red panic button next to the bed. Nurses and a respiratory therapist would come racing in, grab my daughter from my arms, and try to help her through the episode.
The stress was made worse by worries of complications like pneumonia, convulsions, broken ribs, encephalopathy (brain inflammation), and, of course, death. I remember sitting in the hospital room one day, holding Paige in my arms, wondering if funerals were something you did when a newborn died. That tells you how messed up my thinking was.
Finally, we were cleared to go home. Though still coughing, Paige looked much better—but now my husband and I looked like the patients. The coughing continued for several weeks. Paige developed a stomach reflux—I have wondered if it was caused by the violence of the whooping cough episodes.
I realized later that Paige caught whooping cough from those older kids in the pediatrician’s waiting room. It was the only place she’d been since birth. It’s doubtful those children were ever diagnosed, since whooping cough presents as a bad cough and cold in older children and adults. That mom will never know what her decision not to vaccinate cost our family.
And though it may sound cold, it cannot be overlooked that there is a financial cost to childhood disease. A week in the hospital is not cheap. Added to the medical charges for labor and delivery, not to mention lost work and pay, it was a tough burden for our family to bear.
Years have gone by. My husband and I have both had friends and coworkers tell us they were opposed to vaccines until whooping cough tore through their households. My husband’s boss even berated him for taking time off while our daughter was in the hospital, struggling to survive. Having witnessed our daughter’s struggle with whooping cough, I would recommend the vaccine without question. I understand it’s also available for pregnant women who want to protect their baby. I wish I had had that option.
Our poor daughter had a really rough first year of life. Now she’s in her 30s, doing well as an artist in Orlando, though any respiratory infection gives her a worse-than-usual cough.
My husband and I are so incredibly thankful she survived.
Ginny Cunningham and her husband Randy are retired and live in Upstate South Carolina. Paige is their only child and currently lives in Orlando, where she works as a Show Set Designer for a themed entertainment company. Her story, like all others on this blog, was a voluntary submission. If you want to help make a difference, submit your own post by emailing us through our contact form. We depend on real people like you sharing experience to protect others from misinformation.
