This is what can happen when you don't vaccinate your children.

When this has happened to your family, you know that this is not about choice.

The author of this post is known to Mamamia, but has chosen to keep her identity private. 

I stood next to my little brother on a cold winter’s morning. As we stood in front of the heater in our jarmmies, mum knelt before us. She took one of our hands each in hers and she said, “last night Sam* died and went to heaven.”

I remember feeling as though my feet extended through the ground and touched the very core of the earth and that I was now rooted in that spot, never to move again.

Roald Dahl’s powerful letter urging parents to vaccinate their children is heartbreaking.

Two years earlier, my brother Sam started losing his balance. This was the start of a long illness.  My parents got him tested for all sorts of things, cancer, epilepsy and the list goes on. Initially, the doctors couldn’t find anything wrong but he kept getting sicker.

He was an incredibly gentle soul, but he punched a boy in the eye at school. He was being teased – they told him he was going to die. He was 9 years old.

As time went on, he eventually fell into a coma. His eyes were open and he had a tube fed through his nose into his stomach. We lived in the country and occasionally we would all be pulled from school and piled into the kombi van (there were 6 of us kids in total) and drive the 6 hours it took us to get to Sydney because the doctors said that Sam wouldn’t last the day. When this happened, Sam would be put into a helicopter and flown to a hospital in Sydney.

That happened a few times and he always lived beyond it.

“I was so angry at his parents. I held them responsible for their child’s death.”

We went to the hospital every day after school and weekends, we spent Christmas day at the hospital.

Eventually Sam was put on life support. There was no hope for my brother, now aged 11, on life support, sick for two years, in a coma in a hospital bed for over 12 months. It then got to the point where my parents had to decide. It was time to turn off the machine that was keeping him alive.

My parents made that decision. A decision to end the life of their child. A decision to flick a switch that would mean switching of the light, the life and the breath of an 11-year-old boy. A boy who loved soccer and was the best at imaginative play.

We piled into his hospital room, squashed along the end of his bed, that had been his home for over a year and we each said goodbye in our own way.  The switch was flicked. We all went home. He died a week later.

When my mum knelt in front of me and my 3 year old brother that morning in winter and told us Sam had died, my first thought was, I didn’t get to say goodbye.

Despite the several times I had already said goodbye over the year, I didn’t get to say it just before he did die.

When Sam was two he got the measles. When he was nine a complication from the measles which had been dormant in his brain became active and, in layman’s terms, began to eat the brain.

I was seven years old when I watched my brother’s white coffin be lowered into the ground.

I am now 40 years old, I have two degrees, two children, a husband and five fish. There was no question of whether we would vaccinate or not. I didn’t know it could possibly be something to decide that you do or don’t do.

When my son was born it took us 7 months of hell to discover that he has anaphylaxis.

Can parents sue the anti-vaxxers for this measles epidemic? 

The really not funny thing about having a child with anaphylaxis is that his life depends on how other people perceive food allergies. Much like how people perceive vaccinations.

If you think that your child shouldn’t have to be vaccinated in order to protect other people’s children, then I beg of you to spend a day in my shoes, to have my memories, to cry my tears, to feel my broken heart to know that I will do everything I can to protect all children because we each deserve the chance to live. I know what it is to watch a child die slowly from a preventable disease.

You might not think the risk is high, but I’m here to tell you about the consequences of those risks that you put your child and every other child in danger of. The risk is very, very real and it all depends on you.   Choose wisely.

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