On a serious note…

I was chatting with one of my clients last week, a doctor with a busy general practice in the area. He asked me how the kids were, what they were up to, all of the usual chatty things. Then he got serious with me and asked me if I’d had them vaccinated for meningitis and re-vaccinated for whooping cough (pertussis). He urged me to make it a priority, because there have been more than a few reported cases of whooping cough. Ironically, we’d just talked to a teacher friend of ours that is just recovering from whooping cough. That was the first we’d really heard that it was making a comeback here.

That evening I received a very sad email from one of the members of our church asking us to say prayers for a local family who had lost their 19-year old son to meningitis on Christmas Day. He had been sick for about a week with what seemed like the flu, and got sicker that day. They rushed him to the hospital that afternoon, but it was too late and he died shortly after his arrival.

At 19. Years. Old. On Christmas Day. That breaks my heart. I still cry when I think about it. This kid was only three years older than Sticks, in college and didn’t have any chronic illnesses or other things that could open him up to infection. And he wasn’t the only one — another child died the same weekend from the same strain. He was 7. The friend who sent the email asking for prayer lost her youngest son to meningitis when he was 3.

I can’t even entertain the thought of losing one of my kids without falling apart, and especially not to something that we can protect them from. My doctor friend warned me that the meningitis vaccine will not prevent all strains, but it will protect against about 80%.

It seems almost unfathomable to me that in a day and age where we’re making huge strides in the areas of cancer treatments and other disease/medication research our kids’ lives can be at risk from diseases that we assume are under control.

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Tagged as: Parenting