Our Baby Stopped Breathing
As dutiful parents, when our first child was born, we got all her shots with no obvious side affects. Then Sara came along. It was much different this time. The day after her six-week immunization, I went to get something from a box beside her bed, and glanced at her. She was blue/grey and her eyes were open and rolled back in her head. She was cold and not breathing.
With my heart in my mouth, I picked her up and shook her. She gasped. That was the best sound I have ever heard in my life! She went straight back to sleep, oblivious to my turmoil. At that time I didn’t know that a large number of babies who are found not breathing die within 24 hours.
A few weeks earlier I had felt to pray against cot death, and I really believe this is what God used to save her. Needless to say, I did not sleep well for the next few days. I called the doctor and couldn’t get into see him until the next day, despite my telling the receptionist that it was so urgent. After checking, he could not find anything obviously wrong with her.
In the meantime, we hired an apnoea monitor to keep an eye on her. Five days later we got a phone call from the hospital giving us an appointment in six weeks time! With a lot of persuasion, Michael managed to get them to bring it forward to three weeks. But the next day she stopped breathing five times – one time for about one and a half minutes. I called the pediatrician and he said to bring her straight into the hospital.
We spent a week at Timaru hospital, while our daughter had myriads of tests. There were no answers and we felt they considered us hypochondriacs! That was until she stopped breathing in a nurse’s arms. That put the wheels in motion. We were transferred to Dunedin, three hour’s south, for further tests. Two weeks later, on Christmas Eve, we were sent home, knowing nothing, except that she had a slightly abnormal EEG, and reflux. She was put on medication for both and we were told to come back the following month.
By January, it became evident that the anti-convulsant she was on was not reducing the number of apnoeas by enough to warrant their use so we discontinued them. We were still no closer to finding an answer.
All these trips were starting to stretch the old pockets, so before the next appointment we moved to Dunedin. We had only been there one day and she was admitted early as she had an ear infection which caused a marked increase in her apnoeas. She was normally having two to three a day.
She did not have her three-month shot until she was five months, due to repeated ear infections. The night she had her shots, she stopped breathing five times – a significant increase. I called the pediatrician the next morning and he told me that sometimes the whooping cough vaccine caused that! I wondered why I had not been warned of this considering her history. Two months later when she went for her next jab, we omitted the whooping cough one. She stopped breathing seven times! This time the pediatrician told me not to worry as one in 200 babies does this. And they don’t tell everyone? I’ve since met several people with the same story. Some of those babies are not alive today.
In a New Zealand book of case studies on SIDS it is interesting to note that a high proportion of cot deaths happened at six weeks, three months and six months. Do you see the same pattern that I do? The other interesting thing is that SIDS is almost unheard of in those under six weeks. It used to be unheard of in those under two months, before they changed the immunisation schedule.
I continued researching. Here’s a quote from the book, Vaccination: The Hidden Facts by Ian Sinclair. "…We began recording breathing patterns of babies after vaccination. The results of these recordings were presented to the 2nd immunisation Conference, held in Canberra, 27-29 May 1991. We demonstrated that microprocessor records of babies’ breathing after DPT (Diphtheria, Pertussis, Tetanus) injections reveal a pattern of flare-ups of Stress-Induced Breathing closely following the dynamics of adreno-cortical activity in an individual under stress and as observed and recorded by Selye.
We also demonstrated that flare-ups of Stress-Induced Breathing in babies after administration of the DPT vaccine occur characteristically on certain days even though the amplitude of the flare-ups varies from child to child. For 70 babies who succumbed to cot death, although babies could die on any day after DPT injection, there were significantly more deaths on the days that closely correlated with flare-ups of Stress-Induced Breathing after DPT injections… Yet, babies may and do die for up to 25 or more days after vaccination, and still as a direct consequence of the toxic effects of the vaccines… Our conclusion is that if vaccination were to be suspended, the cot death rate would be at least halved."
Sara is now six years and occasionally she still ‘forgets’ to breathe in her sleep. She still needs to be monitored every night. Sometimes she stops breathing long enough that she cannot walk properly the next morning.
CAROLYN LAMB-MILLER
Timaru, New Zealand
Michael and Carolyn are blessed with five children, Alicia 9, Sara 6, Renata 5, Christiana 3 and Bryanna 18 months.