Confessions of a Former Anti-Vaxxer
By: Gwenna Laithland
Tags: Health, Vaccines, Children, Parenting, Kids

By 2009, what little existed of our relationship had crumbled. I packed up the car and our daughter and moved in with my mom. I was faced with putting my daughter in daycare. I went on welfare to make ends meet and was given a childcare stipend. When I enrolled my daughter at the center of choice, they asked me for a massive amount of paperwork, mostly relating to my federal stipend, income, and identity. One paper caused a bit of a problem. The wanted my daughter’s shot records. She didn’t have any because by her father’s insistence she was never vaccinated.

Here’s the confession: I forged the paper.

I’d already burned up every ounce of vacation and then some offered by my boss in the process of leaving my husband and getting resettled. She had to enter daycare immediately. Not having her shots was going to delay her start by another few days — days I didn’t have and the bills needed paying.

Using an old doctor’s note with my family physician’s signature and a bit of photocopy trickery (plus some clever Googling), I crafted a fairly convincing shot record to get her into daycare. It worked: The daycare took it at face value and said nothing more.

I didn’t think of it again until the night my daughter started coughing. She wouldn’t stop coughing. I sat up with her, stroking her hair, as she whimpered with every fit. Sometime after midnight, I decided to take her to the emergency room.

We lived 15 minutes from the best children’s hospital in the state. On the way there, an errant thought occurred: whooping cough (pertussis). I knew nothing about the illness other than you could be vaccinated for it. My heart was in my stomach. In the rearview mirror, I looked up at my miserable little girl, exhausted and still coughing. I didn’t know if whooping cough kills three-year-olds nor what signs to look for. I did know that if it was whooping cough, it was my fault.

Once more, luck was on my side. A battery of tests, a nebulizer, and a round of steroids later, it was concluded that my little girl had a hell of a case of croup, not whooping cough. She was feeling better and we could both breathe again.

I realized I was not doing everything possible to protect this tiny human I was responsible for keeping alive.

As we walked out of the pediatric ER that night, the guilt was gnawing at me. I’d felt the full weight of my daughter’s health on my shoulders. I realized I was not doing everything possible to protect this tiny human I was responsible for keeping alive.

I was on the phone the next day, arranging for my daughter to get those shots I’d fobbed off as “not a big deal.” My heart was changed. If there was an illness out there I could safely prevent, it was going to be prevented. Over the coming days, I did my own research.

I looked into Wakefield, the discredited doctor; I found out thimerosal had actually been removed from vaccines. I consumed most of the Center for Disease Control’s research, the American Academy of Pediatrics, too. My daughter got every round of every vaccine approved for human use. It was like clockwork, if three years late. She turned 11 last year and received the meningitis and HPV vaccines as well. My toddler twins are on schedule for full protection.

A 15-minute car ride wondering whether I could have done something, anything, to prevent my child’s misery was enough to convince me. I never want to see her sick. Of course, she has been sick in these intervening eight years and will be again. But not with things we can vaccinate her for. That fear that I’d failed her as her mother was soul-eating.