I only remember a few things from that illness, patchy images and hazy recollections–laying on the couch covered in blankets and sweat but somehow still shivering, dozing . A doctor comes to the house and looks frightened. Suddenly I’m in a car with mom and the doctor, going fast, real fast. Then…nothing. I wake up in a strange bed in a strange room. There’s clear plastic surrounding me from the waist up. I can breathe. I hear a noise and look up. There’s another kid in the room! I lift my head to and see that it’s a little boy, a toddler. He’s so cute. But my head is so heavy and I’m so, so tired, so I put it back down.
I wasn’t supposed to live through the night, the story goes. You know, the kind of story that our parents and grandparents tell us. About how my parents went downstairs to the hospital chapel where they would sit and pray ‘ til morning. About how my lips and fingernails were already blue by the time the doctor arrived. How the doctor told my parents that she (rare in those days) didn’t have time to do a culture so she would have to give me every type of new penicillin they had. Seven shots in a seven-year-old butt. “Lucky” seven. Nurses holding down a screaming child. Me. Waking up vomiting, covered in it until a nurse chatting away at the desk happened to look up. Every parent’s nightmare; every child’s trauma. Six month later I came down with chicken pox. I missed six weeks of school that year, the second grade. It was tough, but I somehow caught up.
I wish these experiences on no child and on no parent. Vaccines are a gift. Safe. Life-affirming. Responsible.