Reading the very interesting discussion of vaccinations on Badger's site reminds me of when I was younger - this is where my children ease out of the room - and had just had my first baby. There was a serious scare about the safety of the whooping cough vaccine and even after it was proved that it was only one, numbered, batch my doctor refused to give it to my older daughter. As I was young and knew little of such things I went along with his decision. Two years later we were living in Norfolk, as I have described, in a huge ruin filled with builders and I had made best friends with a pair of sisters who had lots of young children. It was summer and everyone running around outside usually bare, (and not just the children - one of the sisters was obsessive about an all over tan), and I was seven months pregnant. Unusually for that season, one tiny boy had a deep smoker's cough. When I mentioned this his mother said, 'Oh God, I forgot to say. He's in the middle of whooping cough and we are all meant to be in quarantine'.

Even then I thought nothing of it. They were my closest friends and it was really cosy that we weren't allowed to see anyone else. We spent every day together, with the children still bare and constantly breathing into each other's faces. The first boy had hardly seemed to notice his illness but slowly some of the others caught it too and their coughing left them unable to breathe and often they were violently sick without warning. Then the school holidays ended and I was left pretty much alone and my daughter started to cough.

She had scary bouts of coughing about every hour and that included the night and with each bout she would make the horrible whooping noise and then suddenly be sick. She was so little and became so tired that I was afraid she would be sick in her sleep and die. So all through the night I sprang up at the faintest choke and rushed into her room. Whooping cough lasts for SIX WEEKS. As she reached her fourth week, I started to cough. I was eight months pregnant at that point and I had the illness as badly as you can get it. I was sure that it was going to bring on premature labour and rang the doctor in a panic. 'I don't think anyone ever COUGHED out a baby, ha ha', he said, 'Have you tried slowly sucking throat sweets?'. 'IT IS WHOOPING COUGH', I said. 'No, no that's not very likely and anyway there is no medicine for it so I'm afraid you will just have to hang in there'.

I should mention here that this doctor had been taken up by one of the sisters who had fallen in love with him during her pregnancy visits. Her family were actors and bohemian and wild and the doctor's head was turned. Nothing ever happened, partly because he was timid and had a tough wife and also she was his patient. There was a lot of heavy flirtation at drunken dinner parties where the doctor was totally out of his depth but smiled a lot and his wife looked silent and uncomfortable. Suggestive games of Charades were often played with the sister and doctor always on the same team. It culminated in two ways. Firstly the sister decided to have her baby at home in her own bedroom, delivered personally by the doctor. This involved her lying there half naked for hours with him investigating her more secret parts in depth. You have to admire her persistence - how could anyone feel sexy in the middle of childbirth? In the thrill of the moment she begged him to be her son's godfather and, (to her husband's fury, 'But we were going to choose people who were rich!), he accepted. 'I've got him in my life forever'. she said smugly afterwards.

Secondly, (of the two ways), the doctor cracked up. The first signs of this became apparent on the night following the birth, when the sister's husband was woken at 4.00 am by a phone call.
'I've been thinking about the afterbirth', the doctor shrieked, 'You must get it immediately and bring it to the telephone. We will compare its appearance with this picture I have here of one infected with brucellosis. If it's the same your wife must rush to hospital immediately'. 'But it's out in the dark in the dustbin', said the husband. 'JUST GET IT'. The husband said later that it was one of the most disgusting things he had ever done. Feeling around in a dustbin by the light of a wavery torch and then carrying the thing in and inspecting it microscopically. Naturally it was totally normal and everyone went back to bed. The doctor started drinking more than heavily and self-administering random medication and at the point of my phone call I think I might have been his only remaining patient. His surgery was always empty and each of my visits lasted more than an hour. Once his hands were shaking too much to give me an injection and he suddenly shouted, 'Oh God, I just can't do this', and ran out of the room. After a bit his wife came in with a cup of tea for me and I went home.

As I have said, Norfolk is very remote and there wasn't a lot to do. At that time the local town contained a doctor, (him), a vicar and the headmaster of the famous public (or private in America) school which happened to be sited there who were all in their 30's and all slightly mad. They formed a close trio and would drive around the district drunk, often after shutting one of them into the boot. The vicar, of whom I will write more some time, once came up to the other sister after a church service and said conversationally, 'Did you notice that I could hardly concentrate on my sermon because I was staring at your breasts?'. The doctor finally took so many of his own drugs that he decided that he was having a nervous breakdown and one dawn he set off and WALKED the thirty miles into Norwich to the nearest mental hospital and handed himself in.

My illness came about mid-way between the birth and the handing in. This is all a bit of an anti-climax after that digression. Anyway, my daughter was still not better and I felt so awful that I decided that if there was no modern medicine I would turn to Ancient Lore. Naturally I had many books of medieval remedies and one of these had an interesting section on grotesque throat ailments. ( I had these books as one of the reasons we left London was because I thought there was going to be a world war and I had set up a useful library for when I was the only person left alive). The recipe involved picking many different herbs in the moonlight, which was no problem for me as Norfolk is very dry and all the tiny herbs I had planted had taken over the entire garden, wildly. You then had to boil them for three days with a large amount of honey, which I did. At the end of the time there was a very small amount of black treacly stuff in the bottom of the double boiler - really only enough for one. With typical motherly self-sacrifice I poured it into a sipping cup and took it to my child. 'This is sooo special', I said, 'You must drink it terribly carefully'. She took a tiny mouthful and then with a convulsive movement spat it out and tossed the cup into the flowerbed, where the treacle drained away. I never had the heart to make it again.

I was still coughing, though weakly, when I finally had my second daughter. Leading up to that I coughed so desperately in the night that I was constantly sicking up large quantities of blood and had to take a bucket to bed. At that time I used to wear (real) long white Victorian nightdresses which you could buy for nothing. My husband had moved to the other end of the house in order to get some sleep but once at about 3.00 am he opened my door at some sinister sounds and says he will never forget. In the low light was a figure with massed, tangled hair and staring eyes, wearing a long red-splashed white gown and clutching to her chest a bowl of blood.

I think the original point of this is that it is probably better for your children to be vaccinated.


- posted by Iris @ 12/08/2003 10:21:00 PM comment