No one told me that I needed a pertussis booster as an adult every 10 years. No one told me that pertussis was whooping cough. No one told me that adults could get it at all. And no one told me that this virus that I read about in old Victorian novels was still around.
When I was 19, I caught whooping cough. It's aptly named. It'd a deep, goose-honking cough that comes in fits that lasts for several minutes, at the end of which you are gasping for breath, holding your stomach in pain, and vomiting.
Yes, you read that correctly, and no, I'm not being hyperbolic.
The coughing fits go on for so long, and the coughs come so rapidly, that it's very like an asthma attack where the cougher can't breathe. In fact, that's what kills people, including those 9 or so babies in California last year. They just suffocated to death. It's a horrible, ugly way to die. And I had these coughing fits about 7 or 8 times a day for about 6 months. Because I was a young adult, in the prime of my life, with adequate nutrition and sanitation, I survived. I didn't realize at the time just how fortunate I was.
The body also tries to expel the mucus through other means than coughing. This means that I had to throw up after every coughing fit. So while I was coughing and gasping for breath, I also had to run around whatever building I was in searching for a bathroom or a door that led outside so I could empty the contents of my stomach. I caught whooping cough when I was a tour guide for the Winchester Mystery House. Let me tell you, it was no easy feat to make it outdoors every time I had a coughing fit.
I went for several years after that initial pertussis infection before starting to cough again. But once I did, it was about once every other year for a couple of years, and now it seems to be once every year. Unfortunately, when I go to the clinic to get treated, they treat me as if I have chronic bronchitis. But no one ever does any tests. I may, in fact, have chronic bronchitis. There are a few mentions in the medical literature that pertussis can lead to chronic bronchitis and that smoking & second-hand smoke is the leading cause of chronic bronchitis (and my housemate smokes - she keeps to her room, but the smoke seeps out through the cracks in the door and through the air vents into my room too), but the symptoms for bronchitis don't match what I have. Or, rather, only the symptoms for chronic bronchitis that are ALSO on the symptom list for pertussis match what I have.
This lasts for months. It's supposed to last only for 6 weeks. It never does.
Doctors routinely prescribe antibiotics for any cough that lasts more than two weeks. You'd think this was a good thing. Except that it means that I have to wait a minimum of two weeks, coughing like my body wants to expel my intestines, before I can get treated. And, for pertussis, antibiotics have to be administered early for there to be any effect, so if it IS pertussis again and not bronchitis, the antibiotics do diddly squat. On the other hand, if it's bronchitis, antibiotics don't do shit either because bronchitis is a virus, not a bacteria. Plus, the specific antibiotic treatment for pertussis is not the same antibiotic that they use to treat chronic bronchitis, so they could be treating me for the wrong disease. whether it's an annual re-infection of pertussis or an annual flare-up of chronic bronchitis, it fucking sucks.
Complications from pertussis include:
Pneumonia
Convulsions
Seizure disorder (permanent)
Nose bleeds
Ear infections
Brain damage from lack of oxygen
Bleeding in the brain (cerebral hemorrhage)
Mental retardation
Slowed or stopped breathing (apnea)
Subconjunctival hemorrhages
Rib fractures
Urinary incontinence
Hernias
Post-cough fainting
Vertebral artery dissection
Death
The reason for this post is to notify and remind everyone to get their vaccinations on time. Whooping cough is especially deadly for babies because they have to be old enough before they can get their vaccination, so any adult might be a carrier and could kill some child. Dragon*Con just happens to offer the pertussis vaccine for free. This is actually a pretty expensive vaccine, so I strongly recommend getting vaccinated at D*C if you go. It's actually the TDaP, Tetnus, Diptheria, & Pertussis. Get it! No excuses! The first year they offered the vaccine clinic was so successful that they used up their entire allotment of vaccines and an HIV testing group set up next to the the following year.
And for fuck's sake, start demanding better healthcare! If vaccines had better PR, I might have known I was supposed to get a booster shot. If I didn't make too much money for government medical aid, I might be able to afford something other than the free clinic, which is only open one day a week and I usually have to try for several weeks before I get selected to be seen. If the economy hadn't crashed, I might have made enough money for private health insurance where I could go to a regular doctor whenever I needed to. If our stupid politicians didn't think that anyone who wanted insurance could pay for it (ergo if you don't have insurance, it's because you don't want it) or that poor people didn't deserve free medical care, it wouldn't matter if I was out of work or working a lot or too far back in line at the free clinic - I could get decent medical care and go back to being a productive, tax-paying citizen instead of hacking up my spleen and wondering how many more of these attacks I have left before it kills me.
Sit through this, if you can:
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