That fear when one of your kids is sick, really sick, is like nothing else. Steve Robson, AMA president, obstetrician and professor at ANU, can tell you. / (min cost $ 0 ) or signup to continue reading His son Tim, now 16, contracted (RSV) as a toddler and collapsed at home.
Steve told 's Dana Daniel: "I find I get emotional, literally to this day, thinking about how we almost lost him." "It was quite possibly the most extraordinarily distressing thing I've been through with my family and, you know, I still find it traumatic." I know that feeling.
I remember rushing to emergency with my 10-day-old baby and chucking an absolute wobbly about getting this tiny infant seen to instantly. My wobbly turned out to be necessary because she had meningitis (thank you very much chief paediatrician for listening to a sobbing mother). I spent the next month crying and breastfeeding, breastfeeding and crying.
Honestly, children. They seem like a good idea at the time. But this is not the moment to remember all the times our children have freaked us out.
It's a time to think about what vaccines are on the free list - and how that process - from good medical research to being available to everyone - works. There is now a vaccine for RSV, the disease which nearly took Tim Robson, and it's on the (thank you Queensland government). RSV cases are on the rise across Australia.
My tiny granddaughter had it and was so so sick. Snot and coughing, coughing and snot. Kids and old people are most at ris.
