Editor’s note: This commentary is by Christie Allen, who is a pediatric nurse at the University of Vermont Medical Center. This is an edited version of her testimony to the House Health Care Committee.
[L]ike all of you, I have the experience of multiple roles. I have been a pediatric nurse for 17 years, a Vermonter, a mother of two young children, one of whom is autistic, and as unlikely as it still feels, a cancer patient.
In July of 2012, I found a lump in my breast while doing a push-up, and at the age of 32, I was diagnosed with invasive breast cancer. I have no contributing family history, no risk factors, and in fact had done “all the right things.” I had breastfed my children, taken vitamins, and eaten organic foods … all the things I knew to do to be healthy and well.
I knew my treatment would mean multiple surgeries and chemotherapy. I wondered how I could afford to be off work, how bad the side effects of treatment would be, but mostly I worried about how I would be able to parent my kids and even be present in their lives.
My son started kindergarten the day before I had a mastectomy. I started chemotherapy a month later. I wondered how I could attend his class events safely. As a nurse, I knew I would essentially be without my immune system for months and that every vaccine I had had would no longer provide me immunity. This lack of immunity meant that while it seemed likely that my cancer diagnosis was not a fatal one, an infection very well could be life-threatening for me. For months I would wear a mask when taking my kids to the pediatrician’s office. I would wear a mask during school pickup. For nearly a year, I worked to strike a balance between limiting my exposure to bacteria and viruses and still parenting my children.
As any parent can tell you, parenting doesn’t stop because you are sick; parenting is a high-stakes game with no do-overs and no sabbaticals. The entire point of my treatment was to allow me to be present in my children’s lives and I refused to be less than present for the 10 months I underwent chemotherapy and subsequent months it took my immune system to recover.
Emerson’s brain processes that make him autistic are no more caused by an exposure to vaccines than his beautiful green eyes, his height, or his sweet affectionate heart.
It was not without risk. My children’s school experienced a pertussis outbreak during my treatment. It reached a point where realistically, before a play date could happen, we had to ask other parents if their children were vaccinated. Having to ask was the only way we had to keep our house as safe as possible. It was incredibly frustrating to know that an exposure to a vaccine preventable illness could end my life.
I am grateful to be past that point now, with a normally functioning immune system. I will never forget what it was like to have to rely on strangers’ decisions to keep me safe and healthy.
The diseases we vaccinate for remain very real. As a pediatric nurse, I have cared for infants in respiratory failure caused by pertussis. They contracted whooping cough or pertussis often when they were too young to be vaccinated. I have spent 12-hour shifts at babies’ bedsides, in full isolation attire, working to ease their breathing. I have seen the havoc bacterial meningitis can wreak on a healthy developing brain and the permanent resulting impairments that last a life time.
Vaccines have been exhaustively researched and proven to be safe. Research repeatedly fails to show any evidence-based connection to autism spectrum disorders. However there remains rampant misinformation and confusion on the issue. Concern over somehow triggering autism is often given as an argument to not vaccinate.
I am not a researcher nor a physician, but I am a mother to an autistic child. From the day my son Emerson was born, I knew that his brain was not wired like a neurotypical child’s. He needed more from us, more help soothing, more help eating, and more help functioning. Emerson will likely need that help throughout his lifetime at different levels. Emerson’s brain processes that make him autistic are no more caused by an exposure to vaccines than his beautiful green eyes, his height, or his sweet affectionate heart. His diagnosis is not, nor has it ever been, the “tragedy” for our family that Mr. Robert Kennedy Jr and other anti-vaccine advocates have espoused.
I firmly and emphatically reject the notion that Emerson’s diagnosis of autism was caused by anything other than genetics and hardwiring in utero. His life as an autistic person does not have less value, less worth, nor does he have fewer contributions to make to our society than someone with a “normal brain.” I would choose Emerson, just as he is, every day of my life. Autism must not be used as an excuse to avoid protecting the vulnerable in our populations.
Three years ago, I had to sit my children down and tell them that I had cancer. My daughter first asked, “Are you going to die?” I wanted to answer her as honestly as possible and I remember blurting “Well, I am going to try really hard not to.” She nodded and said, “Well, who is going to take care of us?” As I opened my mouth to respond, she waved her hands to quiet me and said, “Oooooh, I KNOW! We have a whole community to help us!! Like when you take people food and knit them things and all that. Right?” I nodded, too choked up to speak. Then she asked, “Can I turn Transformers back on and eat a brownie?”
She wasn’t wrong: our community came through for us in a thousand different ways. I had to make a choice to trust that community to keep me safe and cared for and immunizing for vaccine preventable illnesses was an important part of that.
When we talk about herd immunity, I always picture the way an elephant herd protects their weak and young: they place them in the center and stand around them, facing out, ready to do what must be done to protect the smallest and the sickest. I ask our Legislature to repeal the philosophical vaccine exemption and do the same.
