An Introduction
In my other life, I’m a writer of epic romances—the kind of fiction that lives in the space between heartbreak and hope, where characters navigate the exquisite agony of almost having everything they want. I write under a pen name, keeping that part of myself carefully separate from my professional identity.
But one thing our organization has become increasingly interested in is the power of storytelling for medical and public health education. How narrative can reach people in ways that statistics and policy papers cannot. How fiction techniques—character development, emotional arc, visceral detail—can make abstract concepts feel immediate and personal.
This piece was inspired by that intersection. I wrote it today while caring for my sick son, sitting in his darkened room at 3 AM, struck by the profound difference between my worry and the terror that mothers before vaccines must have felt.
What follows is an attempt to use storytelling to bridge that gap—to help us feel, not just understand, what vaccines have given us.
My son is sick.
The thermometer reads 101.3°F, its digital display glowing in the dim light of his bedroom. His small body radiates heat against the sheets, cheeks flushed that deep red that only comes with real fever. When I press my palm to his forehead, the heat transfers instantly to my skin—that particular burning that makes your stomach drop because you know this isn’t just tired or cranky. This is his body fighting something real.
His breathing comes fast and shallow, punctuated by soft whimpers that make my chest tighten with that specific breed of helplessness only mothers understand. The kind that makes you want to bargain with the universe, trade places, absorb his discomfort into your own body if it would give him relief.
Being a mother changes everything about time.
I’d always been someone who measured life in productivity—tasks completed, deadlines met, efficiency optimized. But sitting in this rocking chair at 3 AM, watching my son’s chest rise and fall, I understand what other parents meant when they talked about time stopping. Nothing exists beyond this moment. Not the work emails accumulating in my inbox, not the laundry piling up downstairs, not the normal rhythm of adult life that feels impossibly distant right now.
Just him. Just this fever. Just the weight of being the person responsible for monitoring every breath, every degree of temperature change, every sign that might indicate whether this is getting better or worse.
When your child is sick, the world contracts.
Everything narrows to the dimensions of a single room, to the most basic measurements of human survival. How much liquid has he consumed in the last four hours? When was his last wet diaper? Is he breathing easier than he was twenty minutes ago, or is that wishful thinking?
I’ve developed the hypervigilance of a trauma nurse—noting the exact texture of his cough, the precise color of his cheeks, the way his eyes focus or don’t focus when he briefly wakes. I set alarms for medicine times with the precision of someone managing life support equipment. The bottle of children’s Tylenol sits on his nightstand like a talisman, measured and remeasured to ensure exact dosing.
This is what loving someone more than your own life looks like at 3 AM: complete absorption in their wellbeing, your entire nervous system calibrated to their discomfort.
The humidifier runs its white noise lullaby. Juice boxes stand ready like tiny soldiers. The thermometer lives in my hand, warm from constant use. And somewhere underneath the immediate concern, underneath the maternal instinct to monitor and measure and worry, sits a deeper awareness—one that I almost don’t want to acknowledge because it feels like tempting fate.
This fever, as scary as it feels in this dark room, is probably just a virus. A few rough nights, some missed work, the particular exhaustion that comes from broken sleep and constant vigilance. But not death. Not permanent damage. Not the loss that haunted mothers for millennia.
Because of this awareness, I’m grateful for vaccines.
Not abstract gratitude—the kind you express at dinner tables or in holiday prayers—but the bone-deep appreciation of someone who understands exactly what they’ve been spared.
If I were a mother in Boston in 1890, this same fever could have been a death sentence.
The disease they called the “strangling angel of children” would start exactly like this—fever climbing steadily, a child’s body burning hot against cooling cloths. But within days, I’d notice the subtle changes that meant something deadlier was taking hold. The sore throat that progressed beyond normal discomfort. The way his voice changed, became muffled, as if he were speaking through cotton.
Then would come the membrane—thick and gray, growing across his throat like wet concrete poured into a narrow passage. I’d watch it develop with the horrible fascination of someone witnessing their own child’s potential suffocation. Day by day, breath by breath, it would narrow the space through which air could pass until breathing became a conscious struggle instead of an automatic function.
His breathing would change from fast and shallow to labored and desperate—that specific sound called stridor that every mother learned to recognize and fear. A high-pitched wheeze that meant air was fighting to get through a closing passage. His neck would swell grotesquely. His skin would take on the blue-gray pallor of oxygen starvation.
There would be no antibiotics, no antitoxin, no emergency room to rush to. Just home remedies passed down through generations of grieving mothers: steam from boiling water, desperate attempts to help him cough up pieces of the deadly membrane, increasingly frantic prayers as his breathing became more distressed.
The disease moved through neighborhoods like wildfire. I might lose him on Monday, watch it claim his sister on Wednesday, cradle his baby brother as the infection took hold on Friday. Entire families would fall within a single week, leaving behind empty houses and the particular silence that comes after children’s voices are suddenly absent.
Diphtheria didn’t negotiate or show mercy. It simply spread from child to child through shared cups, bedtime kisses, the ordinary intimacy of family life, until whole communities learned to brace for the sound of church bells marking another small funeral.
If I were a mother in Mississippi in 1946, summer would bring terror instead of swimming and baseball games.
My son would spend a perfect July afternoon at the local pond—diving and splashing with friends, his body strong and coordinated, muscles working exactly as they should. He’d come home sunburned and exhausted, complaining of nothing more serious than a mild headache that I’d attribute to too much sun and excitement.
But within twenty-four hours, that innocent headache would escalate into something unmistakable. Fever climbing past 102. Neck and back pain so severe he couldn’t sit up or bend forward. The stiffness that meant the virus had found its target: his spinal cord.
By the third day, I’d realize his legs weren’t responding to his brain’s commands. The polio virus would be systematically destroying the motor neurons that controlled movement, cutting communication lines between his mind and his muscles with surgical precision.
The ambulance would arrive to take us to the hospital, where children lay trapped in iron lungs—massive metal cylinders that looked more like medieval torture devices than medical equipment. My strong, athletic son would be sealed inside one of these machines, only his head visible through a small porthole, completely dependent on artificial breathing when his own respiratory muscles failed.
I’d sit vigil for months in that institutional room, listening to the rhythmic whoosh of the mechanical breathing apparatus, watching my child’s bright, intelligent eyes—still completely him—looking back at me from inside a steel prison. Through the curved mirror positioned above his face, I could see his expressions: frustration, fear, the terrible awareness that his body had betrayed him in the most fundamental way.
Some children would eventually graduate to smaller portable devices, or leg braces and crutches that allowed a semblance of normal movement. Others would spend their shortened lives completely dependent on machines to keep them alive, their dreams of running and playing reduced to memories of a single afternoon at a swimming hole.
If I were a mother in London in 1962, pregnancy would become a nine-month gauntlet of terror.
German measles seemed so harmless when it struck children—just a low fever and delicate pink rash that spread like watercolor across their skin. Swollen lymph nodes tender to touch. Nothing that a few days of rest wouldn’t resolve completely.
But if that same innocent virus found me during pregnancy, it would cross through my placenta like an invisible saboteur, attacking my developing baby’s most vulnerable systems during those crucial first weeks when I might not even realize I was expecting.
I’d sit in the doctor’s office at twenty weeks pregnant, trying to process medical terminology that felt like a foreign language: “congenital rubella syndrome,” “cardiac malformations,” “sensorineural hearing loss,” “congenital cataracts.” The ultrasound would reveal the devastating reality—my baby’s heart had developed with holes that might never close properly. Cataracts clouded tiny eyes that might never see my face clearly. The delicate structures of inner ears had been destroyed, meaning my child might never hear music, laughter, or my voice saying “I love you.”
Maternity wards filled with mothers like me—women who had spent months dreaming of perfect babies, only to deliver infants whose futures had been stolen by a virus that seemed so inconsequential when it swept through elementary schools. We’d hold these fragile newborns, counting their labored breaths, knowing that every day would bring new challenges, new limitations, new grief for the children they might have been.
The guilt was almost worse than the sorrow. Had I somehow failed to protect my baby? Should I have avoided crowds, stayed home more, taken precautions that no one had told me were necessary? In a world without routine vaccination, every mild illness during pregnancy carried the potential for catastrophe.
And everywhere in the world before 1963, measles waited like an inevitable predator.
Nearly every child would encounter it eventually—the most contagious virus known to medical science, spreading through the air with such efficiency that sharing space with an infected person virtually guaranteed transmission.
It would start innocuously enough: runny nose, persistent cough, fever that climbed steadily higher despite every cooling method I could employ. Then came Koplik’s spots—tiny white dots with blue centers appearing inside the mouth like sinister confetti, harbingers of what was to come.
Within days, the characteristic rash would bloom across his face and spread downward—angry red welts that made his skin look as if it were on fire from the inside out. The fever would spike above 104 degrees. Light would become unbearable, forcing him to hide in darkened rooms. Coughing fits would leave him gasping and exhausted.
But I’d know that even “mild” cases could turn deadly without warning. The virus could attack his brain, causing encephalitis that led to seizures, coma, and permanent intellectual disability. It could trigger pneumonia that filled young lungs with fluid, making every breath a struggle. It could damage his eyes, steal his hearing, weaken his heart in ways that would affect him for whatever life he had remaining.
In the worst years, measles killed over 100,000 children annually in the United States alone. Globally, the death toll reached into the millions. Mothers learned to expect loss as an integral part of parenthood, developing the particular resilience that comes from understanding that love and grief are often inseparable.
I would have sisters, friends, neighbors who buried children. We’d attend funeral after funeral—small white coffins becoming a horrible constant in our communities. Some families would lose multiple children in a single outbreak, the virus moving through households with methodical efficiency, taking the youngest and most vulnerable first, then returning for those whose immune systems couldn’t mount adequate defense.
Back then, every fever was a question mark with potentially devastating answers.
It meant vinegar-soaked cloths laid on burning skin while mothers prayed for temperatures to break. Ice baths for children whose fevers soared above 104 degrees, their small bodies convulsing with chills even as they burned from within. The metallic taste of fear that became a permanent resident in the back of your throat during illness seasons.
Mothers became amateur diagnosticians by necessity, learning to distinguish between the early stages of diphtheria and croup, between measles and scarlet fever, between the first signs of polio and a simple summer cold. We developed the hypervigilance of battlefield medics, noting subtle changes in breathing patterns, skin color, neurological responses that might indicate which disease had invaded our homes.
It was spooning liquid into reluctant mouths, counting each swallow as a small victory against dehydration. It was the sound of labored breathing echoing through thin walls at 3 AM. It was checking on sleeping children multiple times each night, placing gentle hands on small chests to confirm they were still rising and falling with life.
Most of all, it was the silence of empty chairs at dinner tables. High chairs that would never be occupied again. School desks that remained permanently vacant. Playgrounds where certain children’s laughter would never ring out again.
Every mother knew families where there had once been five children and now there were three. Where the family portrait hanging in the front hallway showed faces that existed only in memory. Where bedrooms remained exactly as they’d been left, slowly gathering dust like shrines to interrupted childhoods.
Grief was woven into the fabric of motherhood like a dark thread that appeared in every pattern. Women supported each other through loss with the weary expertise of those who had walked similar paths. We knew how to prepare small bodies for burial, how to comfort mothers whose arms would never hold their children again, how to explain to surviving siblings why their brother or sister wouldn’t be coming home from the hospital.
That’s what vaccines changed—not just medicine, but the entire experience of raising children.
They transformed motherhood from a constant vigil against death into something approaching normal worry. They gave us the extraordinary gift of mundane concerns—the luxury of fretting about hydration and sleep schedules instead of whether our children would survive the night.
Vaccines turned potential death sentences into inconveniences. They transformed diseases that once filled children’s hospitals and morgues into historical footnotes that most modern parents have never heard of. They made it possible for me to sit in this rocking chair with nothing more serious to worry about than when to administer the next dose of Tylenol and whether I should call the pediatrician in the morning.
The mothers who came before us lived in a different world entirely. Our grandmothers and great-grandmothers navigated childhood as if it were a war zone, where every season brought new threats, where love was measured not just in lullabies and bedtime stories but in the desperate vigilance required to keep death from claiming their babies.
They would have traded years of their own lives for what I have tonight: the simple assurance that this feverish child in my arms will recover completely within a week, leaving no permanent damage, no lasting disability, no empty space at our family table.
They would have given anything for the privilege of ordinary parental worry.
So tonight, as I sit in this blue-lit room, thermometer warm in my hand from constant use, watching my son’s chest rise and fall with the steady rhythm of someone fighting nothing more dangerous than a common virus, I hold space for a profound truth.
This fever isn’t the terror it once was. His labored breathing isn’t the death rattle that haunted mothers for centuries. His flushed cheeks aren’t the scarlet brand of scarlet fever. His restless sleep isn’t the precursor to the eternal sleep that claimed so many children before him.
This is the miracle that desperate mothers prayed for with breaking hearts—vaccines that turned childhood killers into minor illnesses. Every shot administered in pediatrician’s offices, every brief moment of tears when the needle goes in, every updated immunization record represents victory over the historical inevitability of loss.
My son shifts in his sleep, and I adjust his blanket with the automatic tenderness of someone who gets to assume recovery. Tomorrow morning, his fever will likely be lower. By the end of the week, he’ll be back to his usual energy, running and playing and taking for granted the simple miracle of his healthy body.
He’ll never know how close his great-great-grandmother’s children came to dying from diseases he’ll never face. He’ll never understand that his ordinary childhood—unmarked by iron lungs or memorial services or the particular grief that comes from losing children—represents the answer to generations of mothers’ most desperate prayers.
And that’s exactly as it should be.
That’s the gift vaccines gave us: the gift of routine recovery, of children who grow up to have children of their own, of futures that stretch out unbroken before our babies. The gift of quiet rooms where there used to be death rattles. Of full dinner tables where there used to be empty chairs. Of mothers who get to worry about normal things instead of mourning dead children.
In this moment, holding vigil over my sick son, I’m living every previous mother’s answered prayer. I’m the recipient of their greatest wish: that someday, somehow, a fever would be just a fever, and children would live to see morning.
This fever is just a fever. And my child will live to see morning.
That simple truth—so ordinary to me, so miraculous to the mothers who came before—is worth more than anything I’ve ever possessed.