I feel so guilty for dismissing my 10-year-old daughter’s symptoms as ‘just’ a cough… but I wonder how much worse it could have been had we skipped the whooping cough vaccine

My daughter started coughing about two months ago, in mid-March.

I admit that I was carelessly indifferent. Frankie is almost 11 years old, but he is pretty strong overall. She rarely gets sick so it never occurred to me to make an appointment with her GP about it.

As it turns out, it was “just” a cough, albeit a pretty bad one.

I didn’t have a runny nose or fever, and I didn’t feel sick. But after a few weeks, at the beginning of Easter weekend, the symptoms worsened and developed into a deep, phlegmatic sound that people started commenting on. “That’s a really bad cough,” they said. And it was.

Multiple times a day, the impact hit her body, leaving her breathless. Her eyes watered and her face turned red from her efforts, causing her to have to hold on to her furniture to support her body.

We knew there was little the GP could do, but things got even more serious as Frankie started vomiting every time she couldn’t stop coughing.

It was awful to watch. A cough started out of nowhere and she had trouble breathing for about 10-15 seconds, then she started feeling sick. She told us that she felt like something was stuck and she couldn’t breathe air.

I became even more worried when I started finding puddles of vomit next to her bed in the morning. It terrified her to think that she could suffocate in one night.

After she was sent home from school two weeks ago for vomiting, I finally took her to see her GP.

I started seeing reports of an increase in whooping cough and read reports of people like Frankie being left vomiting violently. The thought that I might have inadvertently ignored something so serious and contagious filled me with terrible guilt.

Still, Frankie was vaccinated against whooping cough. Additionally, when I was pregnant with her, I was also one of the first group of women to receive the vaccine when it was introduced in the UK in October 2012.

Frankie vomited three times during a visit to her GP, and we saw firsthand how debilitating the cough was.

However, when I suggested the possibility of whooping cough, he felt it was unlikely given her vaccination history. He thought her persistent cough was aggravating an excessive gag reflex and recommended her Strepsils.

But the next day he called me. “I’ve been thinking,” he said, “I think you might be right about whooping cough.” It seems like GPs might have missed it.

He alerted the local health protection team, who conducted tests and prescribed a course of antibiotics.

We are still waiting for the results and have been told it may take several weeks. And Frankie is still coughing violently intermittently, making him feel sick.

I feel terrible that I ignored something so important, and worse, that she could have passed it on to someone more vulnerable.

We would like to express our deepest sympathies to the families who lost their children to whooping cough. In the back of my mind, I wonder how much worse the situation would have been if we hadn’t gotten the vaccine.