About two months ago, in mid-March, my daughter started coughing.
I admit I was happily unconcerned. Frankie is almost 11 years old and overall quite robust. She is rarely sick and it would never have crossed my mind to make a GP appointment for that.
After all, it was “just” a cough, albeit a rather unpleasant one.
He had no runny nose, no temperature and he did not feel sick. But when it got worse after a couple of weeks, at the beginning of the Easter weekend, it became that kind of deep, phlegmatic bark that people started commenting on. “That’s a really nasty cough,” they said. And that was.
Several times a day it took over her body, leaving her breathless. Her eyes would fill with tears from her effort, her face would turn red and she would have to grab onto furniture to support herself.
Jo MacFarlane and her family, her husband Rob, her daughter Frankie and her son Alasdair.
Despite being vaccinated against whooping cough, Frankie developed symptoms including vomiting and difficulty breathing.
He knew there was little a GP could do, but the situation became much more serious when Frankie began vomiting every time the cough took over.
It was horrible to see. The cough would start out of nowhere, and after 10 to 15 seconds of struggling to breathe, she would get sick. She told us that she felt like there was a blockage preventing her from taking air.
It became even more concerning when we started finding puddles of vomit next to his bed in the morning. The thought that she could drown during the night was terrifying.
After she was sent home from school two weeks ago due to vomiting, I finally took her to see our primary care doctor.
I began to see reports of an increase in whooping cough and read the account of someone who, like Frankie, had vomited violently. The thought of having inadvertently ignored something so serious (and contagious) filled me with terrible guilt.
However, Frankie was vaccinated against whooping cough. Additionally, when I was pregnant with her, I was among the first group of women to also receive a vaccine when it was introduced in the UK in October 2012.
Frankie vomited three times during her appointment with her GP, who saw first-hand how the cough consumed her.
The GP initially ruled out the possibility that it was whooping cough given Frankie’s vaccination history, but he called me the next day to tell me he had changed his mind.
However, when I suggested whooping cough, he felt it was unlikely given his vaccination history. He thought his persistent cough was exacerbating an overactive gag reflex and recommended Strepsils.
But the next day he called me. “I’ve been thinking,” she said, “and I think you might be right about the whooping cough.” It looks like GPs might not see it.’
He notified the local health protection team, who carried out a test and prescribed a course of antibiotics.
We are still waiting for the results, which I’m told may take several weeks. And Frankie still coughs intermittently so violently that she feels sick.
I feel terrible that I dismissed something so serious and, even worse, that she could have told it to someone more vulnerable.
My heart goes out to those families who have lost a child to whooping cough. Deep down, I wonder how much worse it could have been if we had skipped the vaccine.