My Stories — Lessons About Death

A story I shared with my grandson about when I had the measles

My grandson was scheduled to get some childhood vaccinations today. Not a COVID one; he’s not old enough for that yet. He needed some of the childhood disease ones.

This little boy is special to me. He and I share superpowers around how we interact with the world through our senses. He was really afraid of getting that needle, and last night my daughter asked me if I would talk to him about it. She knows he listens to what I have to say and also knows I respect his right to make choices about his body.

My reaction was to say, of course, I would. We have a special bond as Nana and grandson. He likes to hear me tell stories about his childhood and his sister’s. He likes to hear about when mommy was a little girl. And he’s also very interested in hearing about when I was a little girl.

So, I said I would tell him a story about when I was a little girl.

I was a little girl in the 1950s and 60s.

There were no effective vaccinations for many things we can prevent now when I was a little girl. Children routinely got sick with the measles, the mumps, and what we called the German measles (rubella). They were “childhood diseases,” an expected part of life.

Death was also an expected part of life.

I wasn’t quite as old as my grandson is when I caught the measles. It was going around our neighborhood. One of my friend’s little brother’s had it bad. That boy had the worst case our doctor had ever heard seen in his many years of being a family doctor.

Mine was the second-worst case he had seen.

I asked whether the little boy, sitting completely enraptured in my story, knew what it meant to have a hallucination. “Yes,” he said, “it’s when you see things that aren’t really there.”

“That’s exactly right,” I agreed. Then I shared some about when I caught the measles.

I saw flies buzzing all around me and screamed for my mother to help me. “The flies!! They’re everywhere!

When I got the measles, it mainly settled in my lungs. Then, when I breathed, there was a loud buzzing sound. I made the buzzing sound so he would know what I meant. We both were fascinated by the sound for a minute, so I repeated it a couple of times.

The other thing that happened to me with the measles was that my temperature spiked to somewhere close to 106 degrees. It was so high that it made me hallucinate. And what things did I see that weren’t really there? Flies. I saw flies buzzing all around me and screamed for my mother to help me. “The flies!! They’re everywhere!”

The doctor had her give me a cold bath to bring down the fever. He was at our apartment because that’s what doctors did back then. They came to your home in a case like mine. He told her there wasn’t anything we could do other than keep the fever down so that I wouldn’t have brain damage.

That night I would either live or die.

He also told her that I would either live or die that night, so she shouldn’t go to sleep.

The landlady, who lived downstairs and had an altar in her front hallway, stayed up all night too. The following day she told my mother she had heard her walking back and forth all night as she held a long vigil over her only child.

The little boy down the street survived. But because his case primarily affected his brain, he was being wheeled around in a shopping cart the last time I remember seeing him, listless and not the same little boy he was before he caught that “childhood disease.” Many other children in my community were sick that year, none as bad as the two of us, but all of them were sick enough to have to stay in bed.

“I don’t like this story,” my grandson said.

This story has a good ending.

“Oh, but there’s a happy ending,” I told him.

“Yeah, I get it; you survived,” he said, ready for this story to be over. He is so innocent still. He had gotten so swept up in the story that it didn’t even occur to him to wonder where all this was going.

Not long after I nearly died from the measles, the first vaccines against that “childhood disease” were developed and licensed. Children stopped dying from measles. Measles is considered to have been eliminated in the United States. Smallpox was eradicated around the world. Vaccinations were successful in changing childhood diseases from something inevitable to something that families could avoid. (Note, none of the links in this article are affiliate links.)

That was the happy ending.

For the most part, childhood diseases became a thing of the past because of the vaccinations my grandson was scheduled to get. I explained he would get a tiny “prick” in his arm instead of getting a disease that could kill him, the way it almost killed his grandmother or suffer the pain of the mumps, which I only briefly described, because I was pretty sure I had made my point by now.

And that was the end of the story I told him.

I understand that later that night, he asked his mother to explain how vaccines work in the body, and I’m happy to say he chose to get his shots today and is proud of himself for being brave, as we all are proud of him.

The rest of this post is for the adults reading this story.

This post is not about politics; it is about life and death.

This post is likely to be seen as a political statement, and that is unfortunate. The issue of vaccinations has become highly polarized, with debate on online platforms becoming increasingly contentious. On one side, some anti-vaxxers oppose vaccines for a wide variety of reasons, and on the other side are those who vilify the anti-vax side, fully supporting government schedules for administering vaccines, regardless of what those schedules may be — and there is a good deal of variance around the globe on requirements. There is little room or tolerance in public discourse for those who may be anywhere in the middle. People who seek to follow a delayed and selective process often hide their opinions, even if they are working directly with their physician to create an alternate schedule for their children or themselves.

The result of this polarization is that we only hear unreasonable positions that are unmovable. Yet, at this time, more than any other, we need to be able to communicate about this issue, with the goal of finding a middle ground that will allow us to defeat this plague.

I want to say I’m not a fan of vaccinations for every possible illness that comes along. Over the decades of my life, I’ve witnessed the outcomes of inadequately tested vaccines that caused more harm than good, such as the swine flu debacle, which happened while I was still in college. I personally know two otherwise healthy children who died within a day or two after receiving shots as infants back in the 1980s, using vaccines that were redeveloped and made safer in the 1990s.

Not all diseases are equal threats.

Whenever a vaccine turned out to be dangerous, public trust, including at times my own, was eroded. In fact, I still believe in discussing any proposed vaccination with my doctor to determine if it is worthwhile for me, which I also did when raising a child.

Covid is a game-changer.

At this point in history, the process of how vaccines work in the body, that excellent question asked by my grandson last night, is something scientists have been asking for the last 60 + years.

All of us need to realize that times have changed. Covid has shown the ability to mutate into even worse forms without intervention. At this point in history, the process of how vaccines work in the body, that excellent question asked by my grandson last night, is something scientists have been asking for the last 60 + years. Now they understand many of the processes and the dangers they didn’t before.

I gladly got my two shots to protect me from Covid, even though I had initial concerns. I changed my opinion partly because this disease is deadly, but mostly because I have watched the scientific resources brought to bear upon vaccinations as a whole, over decades of research and refinement. The success of the current vaccines is the result of nearly a century of dedication to a mission of eradicating deadly childhood illnesses. Over the course of my daughter’s lifetime, I’ve watched as the shots became safer, listened as she showed me data confirming that the benefits are worth the risks for many of the currently available vaccinations.

I’m proud of my grandson. I’m also proud of myself for continuing to learn and grow my knowledge about these critical issues that have unfolded over the course of my lifetime.