The terrifying experience that made me a fierce supporter of vaccines

In 1988, when I was 34 weeks pregnant with my first child, my waters broke in a Thai restaurant. Yeah, I know, embarrassing. I found myself in hospital that night, where I was to stay, if only I had realised it, for the next six weeks, apart from a couple of days. It was the beginning of what remains the most terrifying experience of my life.

We spent 10 days in ICU. It was full of RSV babies and children who were suffering all kinds of major health crises.Credit: ISTOCK

A week later, my daughter was induced at 35 weeks. I had spent the previous seven days confined to my hospital bed, being injected with steroids to help my baby’s lungs mature. Then, I developed an infection – once the waters break, the womb is no longer sterile – and it was time to get the baby out. The birth was wonderful, mostly thanks to a timely epidural and my daughter was born in such good nick that she received an Apgar score of 9 out of 10. She did not need to go into a humidicrib, even though she was premmie and weighed only 2.5 kilos. She went into a special care nursery, which we were pleased about at the time, but lived to regret.

We spent a further week in hospital because, like many premmie babies, she was jaundiced. She spent a few days under lights, wearing goggles. She looked like a baby on a beach holiday. Then, her bilirubin under control (yes, I learnt a lot of the lingo), she was allowed back into the special care nursery, where I watched a snotty toddler run from crib to crib.

At 10 days old, she was discharged and we came home. On her second night, she would not settle to feed, and I saw thick white snot gush from her nose.

The next day, we were back in hospital. She had contracted RSV-positive bronchiolitis, the largest cause of hospitalisation in children under two. It is particularly risky for premature babies. A baby’s ward in the middle of winter in a hospital built in 1906 full of wheezing and coughing infants is not a good place to be at the best of times. For us, it was where we very nearly lost our first child.

A baby’s ward in the middle of winter in a hospital built in 1906 full of wheezing and coughing infants is not a good place to be at the best of times.

JANE CARO

The worst side effect of RSV was that the child would stop breathing – apnoea, they called it. And when I watched my 13-day-old daughter’s chest labour in and out – “breathing up” they called it – I could believe it. But her colour was good, we kept being told by nurses run off their feet. As I realised later, those bilirubins had not yet completely gone. And she was still breastfeeding, wasn’t she? Was she? I had never breastfed before. How would I know how much milk she’d had? There wasn’t a gauge on either of my breasts.

Then she stopped breathing. The dreaded apnoea. Not once, not twice, but three times. Bells were rung, alarms sounded, medical personnel came from everywhere, a phalanx of white coats between me and my tiny daughter. After the first time, someone appeared and told me she was breathing again. Then she wasn’t. I sat on the floor. It seemed safer than a chair. The second time, I crawled into a corner, behind a pot plant. I don’t know why, a wounded animal response, perhaps? I needed my back covered.

The third time, she was put on a full-size bed and rushed full tilt to ICU, a nurse perched on the bed beside her manually pumping air into her lungs. I later found out she received the last available paediatric ICU bed in NSW that night. She stopped breathing again when they intubated her, but by that time, as the intensivist (yep, that’s what they are called) explained, she couldn’t die because they were doing her breathing for her.

We spent 10 days in ICU. That’s a long time. It was full of RSV babies and children who were suffering all kinds of major health crises. It was an incredible place, and the care was next level, but it was also grim. Heel pricks, stab gases, lungs suctioned every two hours. I held the only hand my baby had that was free of drips and drains and monitors and said “I am your mother, and I don’t hurt you” like a mantra over and over. The only blessing – apart from the fact they saved her life – is that she was too young to anticipate the next painful intervention. The reaction of some of the toddlers is seared into my memory.

There was no vaccine for RSV in 1988 or for many long years afterwards. Many little ones suffered as mine did and, no doubt, some of them died. Having spent all of May and half of June in wards full of desperately sick babies, I have been a fierce supporter of vaccines ever since. Recently, the government announced that the relatively new RSV vaccine will be given free of charge to all pregnant women in this country to protect their babies.

It’s the very best news I have heard for a very long time. I don’t want any children, or any new parents, to go through what we had to that winter. Vaccines save lives.

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