Whooping Cough Aftermath: A Life of Complications
Could a Vaccine Have Prevented the Years of Ailments?
No one should have to go through what my family did when my vaccinated son contracted whooping cough from a child infected with the highly contagious disease. His mother wrongly believed in “natural immunity.” Her son and mine paid the price for her decision not to vaccinate.
The last big outbreak of whooping cough 20 years ago hit hard at home, here in Santa Barbara. It’s disturbing to know the disease is on the rise once again because vaccinations — like just about everything else in American life these days — have now become embroiled in political beliefs rather than scientific fact. I’m compelled to share my own hard-learned lessons from my child’s long-term consequences from a case of a vaccine-preventable disease. It’s something the anti-vaxxers do not discuss.
The nightmarish coughing spasms — so severe they left my then-eight-year-old son gasping for air around the clock and left both of us sleepless at night — were a grim reality for months. And the damage lingered far longer.
Shocked by the severity of a vaccine-preventable illness, I learned everything I could and shared that new-found expertise in a memorable cover story for the Santa Barbara Independent, titled “Hundred-Day Hack.” It was widely reprinted after it was posted on the website of Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia where outspoken advocate Dr. Paul Offit serves as director of the Vaccine Education Center. https://www.chop.edu/parents-pack/personal-stories/whooping-cough#hundreddayhack I even ended up speaking out about our long, difficult experience with whooping cough on the Today Show and was flown to Rochester, NY, for an appearance on the PBS show Second Opinion.
I was roundly denounced online and in person by so-called “anti-vaxxers” for spreading the word about our lived experienced. Who even knew, back then, there was even such a term, much less a movement? It’s horrifying to me that their science-denying leader, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is put forth as qualified to head up the Department of Health and Human Services.
Another pertussis outbreak in 2011 — more than 4,000 cases in California, the most in a half-century, and 45 cases in Santa Barbara County — was so bad that the Santa Barbara school district dialed up robo-calls to inform parents about it. This is the follow-up to the original story, a cautionary tale about life after the coughing stops. It’s bad enough to contract the disease — coming back from it can be just as difficult.
The bout with whooping cough left my formerly sturdy, confident kid emotionally spent and physically more vulnerable than ever before — and he missed months of school recuperating from the initial infection and its lingering effects.
Despite all our best efforts to restore his previous robust health, every bug that came along stopped off and took up with him. Slight sniffles turned into bad colds and hacking bronchitis that brought back fresh memories of his worst coughing ever; he just couldn’t get healthy again. Finally, his pediatrician referred us to our local allergy and asthma specialist, where he underwent a series of pulmonary exams.
He was diagnosed with “reactive airway disease,” secondary to the whooping cough. His bronchial tubes so damaged and inflamed from all that sustained coughing that he resembled a child with asthma. A complete medical package of powerful drugs was prescribed for him; we learned about nebulizers and inhalers, steroids and side effects, measuring breathing and how important it was to monitor his breathing capacity twice a day. We stocked our emergency bottle of Prednisone and vials of Xopenex and dispensed them on panicked occasions when he needed help breathing.
Far too often he ended up in the physician’s office where the stethoscope revealed twitchy, crackling sounds in his breathing where they shouldn’t have been. He dutifully took his daily doses of powerful Advair and Singulair — new-fangled ways to cope with the effects of an old-fashioned disease and repair his injured respiratory system — even though he hated taking the pills and dealing with an inhaler. The frequent doctor visits, medications and treatments — not covered by our insurance — cost us a small fortune and added financial stress to the ever-present worry for our child.
The deep, hard, dry cough that wracked this budding athlete’s body whenever he ran was a near-constant reminder of long-lasting toll that brutal disease exacted from him. I came to rely on the advice of one of my neighbors, a respiratory therapist, about when he needed to be seen immediately by his specialist. We got to know the school nurse, the routine of supplying an emergency Albuterol inhaler at the school, along with doctor-signed permission slips for him to use it on a field trip or campout. Whenever there was concern about poor air quality due to nearby wildfires, my husband literally took our son out of town so he could breathe.
It took more than three years of hovering and meticulous attention to his daily routine of medications and monitoring him for symptoms of struggles for him to finally return to his previous state of health. But even now in his twenties, he has vivid memories of those long days and difficult nights when every breath was an effort that left him panicked, wondering if the next one would come.
It all comes down to pathology vs. ideology. Bordetella pertussis, the bacterial strain that causes whooping cough, cannot be stopped by some political belief.
Just as COVID is not “just the flu” and its long-term effects are debilitating, whooping cough is not “just a cough.” Once it takes hold, there’s not much that can be done; it lingers far too long in the individual mind, body, and spirit. And it infects our community with dangerous beliefs when vaccines exist to protect ourselves and one another.