Whooping Cough - A Mother's Story Video Transcript

Transcript for whooping cough - a mother's story video

Anna Gibson, Mackenzie's mother

I'm Anna and this is Mackenzie and she's 7 and a half months old and she got whooping cough when she was
7 weeks old. She just got a little cough to start with and then it just progressively got worse and worse.

[audio of Mackenzie coughing]

She would start coughing and just cough and cough and didn't know to breathe back in so she'd cough and cough and cough and turn blue in the face and then eventually take a big < audio of large inhale>  breath in and then cough, cough, cough again. And that was the hard bit when I didn't know what it was and being at home and she's tuning blue and sort of thinking what happens if this goes a little bit further?

Eventually they admitted us to hospital so they put us in isolation and we were in there for 10 days. The first few days in there were pretty awful and then she sort of progressively got better and better and better until we didn't need the oxygen anymore. We're pretty sure that she got it from her dad but it was too late before we realised that he had whooping cough because as an adult, you sort of you have the cough but you don't think much of it often and so before he sort of realised that she already had it so it was sort of too little too late. Yeah he felt pretty bad that he had passed it on.

[audio of Mackenzie coughing and crying]

Before she was born we learned about the vaccinations in antenatal with a booster vaccination for adults and I said to him 'you should go and get one of those' but then we forgot about it and didn't do anything about it and sure enough he got it. So yeah I would have pushed it further and made him and probably got it myself, the booster vaccination beforehand because if he hadn't of got it then she potentially wouldn't have got it either.