I will never forget the first time I came down with croup, or whooping cough. It has the telltale sound of a seal barking when a person coughs. It is known as Pertussis in the medical field, and children these days are vaccinated for whooping cough, though in my day a person had to suffer with it and hope the mucous did not completely close off their throats so they could breathe.

It was the late seventies and the middle of the night. I hadn’t been feeling well for a few days with cold-like symptoms–coughing, stuffy nose, headache, fevers, and body aches. I awoke in the middle of the night feeling like I couldn’t swallow. I had to cough so badly, but when I did, it was just a dry, hacking, barking cough. It hurt and burned my throat. My mother was frenzied. I was the first of her children to ever come down with croup. After several phone calls to the pediatrician, I was put into a hot shower, where the steam and moisture filled my lungs. I was able to start coughing up some of the mucous that was clogging my airways and slowly suffocating me. My lips turned from a pale blue back to their rosy pink color, and the color began returning to my cheeks. It was frightening, but the worst of the illness was over. A course of antibiotics cleared the rest of the illness, and from there I was fine.

When I entered fourth grade, there was a wonderful Language Arts teacher who had also suffered croup in her childhood. She, unfortunately, did not receive the same care I was given as medical advances to understand and treat the illness had not yet come to light. She had a constant, barking cough. And though it had been decades since her bout with croup, she still suffered from a chronic cough that lasted her entire life. It’s interesting how just a few decades of medical advances can change a person’s life. Later in life, when I had children of my own, there was an outbreak of croup at my son’s daycare center. Even though my son had been vaccinated for Pertussis, there were other children at the center who had not been vaccinated. It was spreading quickly among the children in the center.

My son became ill shortly after, and although he had been vaccinated to prevent the illness, he had still become infected with croup. Evidently, the vaccine is extremely effective, but if a child’s immune system is struggling for some reason, they can become ill with croup. He had chronic reactive airway disease at the time, and the croup almost killed him at the young age of two. Fortunately, with a hefty course of IV antibiotics, steroids, oxygen, and a long hospital stay, he recovered fully. It gave my family quite a scare, though, and none of us will ever forget the gurgling sounds of our young son suffocating on the fluid in his lungs, and the hacking, barking cough that was the tell-tale sign of a case of croup.