I feel guilty for dismissing my daughter’s symptoms as ‘just’ a cough

It was about two months ago, in the middle of March, that my daughter started coughing.

I’ll admit I was blithely unconcerned. Frankie is nearly 11 and generally pretty robust. She’s rarely ill and it would never have crossed my mind to make a GP appointment over it.

After all, it was ‘just’ a cough, albeit a pretty nasty one.

There was no runny nose, no temperature and she wasn’t feeling unwell. But when it worsened after a couple of weeks, at the start of the Easter weekend, it became the kind of deep, phlegmatic bark that people started to comment on. ‘That’s a really nasty cough,’ they’d say. And it was.

Multiple times a day it would take over her body, leaving her gasping for breath. Her eyes would tear from the effort, her face would redden and she’d have to grab hold of furniture for support.

I knew there was little that a GP could do, but it became far more serious when Frankie started throwing up every time that cough took over.

It was awful to watch. The cough would start from nowhere and, after 10-15 seconds of struggling to breathe, she would be sick. She told us that it felt like there was a blockage which was stopping her from getting any air.

It became even more worrying when we started to find pools of vomit by her bed in the morning. The idea that she could choke overnight was terrifying.

After she was sent home from school two weeks ago because of the vomiting I finally took her to see our GP.

I had started seeing reports of a rise in whooping cough and read an account from someone who, like Frankie, had been left throwing up violently. The idea that I might have inadvertently ignored something so serious – and contagious – filled me with an awful guilt.

Yet Frankie was vaccinated against whooping cough. In addition, when I was pregnant with her, I was among the first cohort of women to also receive a vaccine when it was introduced in the UK in October 2012.

Frankie vomited three times during her appointment with the GP, who saw first-hand how the cough consumed her.

However, when I suggested whooping cough, he felt it was unlikely given her vaccination history. He thought her lingering cough was exacerbating an over-active gag reflex, and recommended Strepsils. 

But the next day he rang me. ‘I’ve been thinking,’ he said, ‘and I think you might be right about the whooping cough. It seems that GPs might be missing it.’

He notified the local health protection team, which sent out a test, and prescribed a course of antibiotics.

We’re still waiting for the results, which I’m told can take several weeks. And Frankie is still intermittently coughing so violently that she is sick.

I feel terrible that I dismissed something so serious – and even worse, that she might have passed it on to someone more vulnerable.

My heart goes out to those families who have lost a child to whooping cough. At the back of my mind, I wonder how much worse it could have been had we skipped the vaccine ourselves.