A Child's Severe Reaction to a Vaccine Alters Life
By Sarah Bridges
Web Exclusive
This is the lesson you don't get in the parenting books: Sometimes bad things happen from doing the right thing for your baby.
Porter's high-pitched scream woke us at midnight. When I ran to the nursery and picked him up, his sleeper was damp and his head flopped to the side. My husband grabbed the phone and punched in the number for the pediatrician.
"Hurry," I yelled, even though Brian was dialing as fast as he could. He reached for Porter, then handed me the phone. "It's the nurses' line," he said.
"What's the problem?" a voice on the other end asked calmly.
"Our baby has a fever and is listless. He was fine today," I said. "The doctor said he was perfectly healthy at his well-baby appointment this afternoon."
"Did he get his vaccines?"
"Yes."
"It's probably the shots -- fevers are typical after the DPT."
"But he isn't waking up."
Her voice changed. "Get to the emergency room -- I'll tell them you are on your way."
Brian pulled Porter's 2-year-old sister, Tyler, out of her bed and strapped her, still sleeping, into her car seat. The freeway was empty as we barreled to the hospital, the windows in the car opened for air. Porter lay on my lap with his eyes closed, and my legs felt hot under his body. We turned past the bar with the sign that read, "THE BEST TIME OF YOUR LIFE."
A nurse met us at the emergency room entrance and carried Porter to an examining room. Within minutes of arriving, Porter began a 90-minute grand mal seizure. Watching helplessly, I was pressed against the wall as a doctor jammed a breathing tube down my son's throat. Porter, just 4 months old, lurched on the table while nurses stuck syringes of Valium into his arms.
After a minute, the doctor turned to me and said, "Don't worry, we'll stop it. I'm sure about that. It's just that we may need to sedate him to the point that he'll quit breathing." In that instant, in that one sentence, everything I took for granted vanished.
At first, the doctors thought Porter would be fine. They said it was a bad reaction -- a rare side effect to the pertussis vaccine, which can cause seizures in some children and brain injury in others -- but that brain damage was so rare we shouldn't think much about it. Of course, I couldn't think of anything else but the worst-case scenario. When Porter awoke in one piece, he seemed alert, but beyond that we were guessing. The day after his seizure the pediatrician asked, "Does he still do the same things he did before the reaction?" My mind went blank as I struggled to recall what exactly a 4-month-old did.
After 72 hours in the hospital Porter was smiling again, and by the end of the day he was allowed to go home. Porter seemed fine, and I told everyone who asked about him how lucky we were.
And then two weeks later he stopped breathing read on...
Web Exclusive
This is the lesson you don't get in the parenting books: Sometimes bad things happen from doing the right thing for your baby.
Porter's high-pitched scream woke us at midnight. When I ran to the nursery and picked him up, his sleeper was damp and his head flopped to the side. My husband grabbed the phone and punched in the number for the pediatrician.
"Hurry," I yelled, even though Brian was dialing as fast as he could. He reached for Porter, then handed me the phone. "It's the nurses' line," he said.
"What's the problem?" a voice on the other end asked calmly.
"Our baby has a fever and is listless. He was fine today," I said. "The doctor said he was perfectly healthy at his well-baby appointment this afternoon."
"Did he get his vaccines?"
"Yes."
"It's probably the shots -- fevers are typical after the DPT."
"But he isn't waking up."
Her voice changed. "Get to the emergency room -- I'll tell them you are on your way."
Brian pulled Porter's 2-year-old sister, Tyler, out of her bed and strapped her, still sleeping, into her car seat. The freeway was empty as we barreled to the hospital, the windows in the car opened for air. Porter lay on my lap with his eyes closed, and my legs felt hot under his body. We turned past the bar with the sign that read, "THE BEST TIME OF YOUR LIFE."
A nurse met us at the emergency room entrance and carried Porter to an examining room. Within minutes of arriving, Porter began a 90-minute grand mal seizure. Watching helplessly, I was pressed against the wall as a doctor jammed a breathing tube down my son's throat. Porter, just 4 months old, lurched on the table while nurses stuck syringes of Valium into his arms.
After a minute, the doctor turned to me and said, "Don't worry, we'll stop it. I'm sure about that. It's just that we may need to sedate him to the point that he'll quit breathing." In that instant, in that one sentence, everything I took for granted vanished.
At first, the doctors thought Porter would be fine. They said it was a bad reaction -- a rare side effect to the pertussis vaccine, which can cause seizures in some children and brain injury in others -- but that brain damage was so rare we shouldn't think much about it. Of course, I couldn't think of anything else but the worst-case scenario. When Porter awoke in one piece, he seemed alert, but beyond that we were guessing. The day after his seizure the pediatrician asked, "Does he still do the same things he did before the reaction?" My mind went blank as I struggled to recall what exactly a 4-month-old did.
After 72 hours in the hospital Porter was smiling again, and by the end of the day he was allowed to go home. Porter seemed fine, and I told everyone who asked about him how lucky we were.
And then two weeks later he stopped breathing read on...
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