From Unvaccinated Child to Epidemiologist

 Through the Looking Glass

I remember the day I found out I was unvaccinated. 

I was struggling through the digital forms that would allow me to live on campus my freshman year of college, and I had to provide documentation that I was vaccinated appropriately. 

I yelled downstairs to ask my mom if she had the documents. 

“No” she shouted back. 

“What? Where is it? What do you mean” I peppered her, finally leaving my room to come downstairs to the living room.

“It doesn’t exist,” she said. 

I was stunned. 

She walked down the narrow basement stairs to rummage in the filing cabinet that held all my documents, and she returned from the depths of the storage room with a folded yellow card with my name and date of birth on it in her handwriting. Inside, the card was blank except for two lines – a polio vaccination and a tetanus shot at age two. 

Living in a state with quite strict rules about vaccine exemptions, I had no choice – I had to get vaccinated. 

That day, I booked a doctor’s appointment to get vaccinated. Now more than ten years on, I don’t remember if the doctor had anything to say about an 18-year-old getting vaccines normally reserved for infants. However, I do remember getting a crash course on vaccine schedules. 

You see, when a vaccine requires more than one dose, there is often a certain amount of time you have to wait between doses in order for the vaccinations to be considered valid. What I was worried about was if there was enough time between the first shot and when the on-campus housing paperwork was due. 

I left the first round of vaccines panicked. I rushed home and pulled up Google and a calendar, trying to do the math on if I was able to get the required vaccines on the required schedule with enough time to submit the forms by the deadline.

I was required to get vaccinated for measles, mumps, rubella, tetanus, diphtheria, pertussis, and meningococcal disease. There were several “suggested” vaccinations that frankly there was no time for. 

There are many reasons why the majority of our vaccines are given to us in infancy and not as young adults. For one, the fatigue, malaise, and arm soreness and much worse as an adult. I left the doctor’s office that day with several vaccines in each arm and laid in bed with flu-like symptoms for days. Over the phone the nurse who called to check on me said that this is “normal” and meant the vaccine was “working”. I bubbled with resentment towards my mother. 

I survived the ordeal and was able to move into my college dorm without incident a few months later, but this experience made a lot of seemingly innocuous experiences in my childhood make more sense (and also make me wonder how I made it 13 years without being discovered). 

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I was born in a state that has (in)famously lax regulations around pediatric vaccination, and when I was five, moved to a state that had notoriously strict laws. I’m guessing that due to that strictness, the my elementary school assumed that I was vaccinated and never asked. A clerical oversight, as it were. And since I made it through elementary school, why would the middle or high school ask for my vaccine records? 

However, the assumptions about my vaccination status worked against me when I was about eight years old. 

I contracted whooping cough.

We didn’t know it was whooping cough at the time, but hindsight and a career in epidemiology makes me pretty sure my mystery illness was pertussis. 

The symptoms felt like any other cold at the start: a sore throat, sniffles, but also intense coughing fits. I’d cough and cough and cough and cough, until I was out of air and my throat burned. My lips and nailbeds would turn blue, and I’d struggle to inhale, gasping. I would get dizzy, my vision shrinking to a dark tunnel, noises getting distant. This went on for weeks.

Several doctors, unfamiliar with the clinical presentation of whooping cough and likely thinking I was vaccinated, could not figure out what was making me sick. 

I was placed on several antibiotics, was taken to an allergist, a pulmonologist, was wrongly diagnosed with asthma and given several different kinds of inhalers, got a PET scan, a stress test, endless nebulizers, and eventually developed bacterial pneumonia – a common complication of whooping cough. 

This ordeal that lasted months. My poor mother was clearly distressed by the blue lips of her coughing child, my swollen face after taking the wrong antibiotic, medication after medication after medication, with nothing seeming to help. 

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I have nothing but empathy for parents who are hesitant to vaccinate their kids. I know that, like my own mother, maybe their first born has autism, or they had negative experiences with a healthcare provider that broke their trust forever. There’s so much information out there about how the pharmaceutical industry, and industry in general, is out to keep us sick and milk us for profit. 

I get it.

In this day and age, we now have the luxury of forgetting – forgetting our long-gone uncles and aunts, friends and community members, who never grew up because they died from a childhood illness that is now preventable with vaccination.  

The only reason I received a polio vaccine was because my mother was old enough to remember classmates with withered, twisted legs encased in iron braces. 

I was able to go unvaccinated (and unscathed) for so long everyone else was vaccinated. 

I was able to grow up and pursue a career as an infectious disease scientist – an epidemiologist - because everyone else was vaccinated.

And it’s now during this career that I have to call parents and tell them that their unvaccinated, hospitalized child has measles. It’s during this career that I have to call the family of the recently deceased and ask them to put their grief aside and answer the questions on my checklist. It’s during this career that I have to calculate just how many more people will get sick and possibly die before the virus no longer has a host to infect. 

Please, when herd immunity collapses, vaccinate your children.