As for Mindy Syler Hale and her husband Brandon, they've started urging all their friends and family to receive the Tdap vaccination. What happened to Brooks, she says, put everything in perspective. "Think how you'd feel sitting there and looking at your child go through what we went through. Think about having to put your child on that helicopter and not knowing whether when you got to the hospital, he'd be alive. Even our pediatrician didn't know if he'd survive the flight."
Mindy now wonders if Brooks would have had more antibodies in his system, more immunity, if she'd been vaccinated during her pregnancy. "He might still have caught whooping cough," she says, "but it would have given him more of a fighting chance."
If that were the case—or if Brooks' father, Brandon, had been vaccinated against the disease—maybe Brooks would have avoided the Life-Flight to Lubbock. Maybe Mindy and Brandon wouldn't have had that heartbreaking two-hour drive. Maybe they wouldn't have had to look at him lying on a gurney, wearing an oxygen mask.
"It makes you wonder," Mindy says. "Whether we'd have gone through everything we went through." And yet Brooks survived. Despite everything that happened, he was one of the lucky ones.
---Steve
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