I Wish My Mom Had Vaccinated Me

— -- (Editor's Note: This article originally appeared on Babble.com. It has been reprinted here with permission. The Walt Disney Co. is the parent company of both ABC News and Babble.)

My mom was an anti-vaxxer before that was even such a thing. I was born in the ‘70s, when few people had even heard of autism and most parents remembered their own experiences with childhood illnesses (like measles) before there were vaccines to prevent them. As part of a generation that lived through polio, most parents enthusiastically vaccinated their children against everything they could. Why wouldn’t they? Vaccines just weren’t the controversial issue they are today. Except to my mom.

Like her own mother, my mom didn’t trust doctors. Her reasons were complicated and unique to her childhood experiences. She grew up in a rural area where most people weren’t educated, and tended to mistrust authority. The experiences she did have with doctors (whom she later described as insensitive and frightening) were extremely negative. So my mom learned to resist change and think that things should be done “the way they always had.” My grandmother, her mother, was the same way. They thought that vaccines were, at best, a money-making scheme, and, at worst, a sinister government plot to inject something nefarious into the bodies of innocent children.

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I lived with my paternal grandmother for a few years when I was little. She had me vaccinated during that time, but by the time I went to live with my mother in another state, my vaccination schedule wasn’t complete. I wasn’t completely unvaccinated, but I wasn’t adequately vaccinated and I wouldn’t be until I was an adult. Because my mother believed she was protecting me and my younger sister, we didn’t go to doctors. Like ever. She fed us nourishing foods, let us play outside every day, and encouraged us to eat vegetables and get lots of exercise. Our health was very important to her and part of keeping us well, to her, meant no vaccines, or at least no more vaccines. Luckily, herd immunity was very strong back then, and neither one of us caught anything serious. At least, we didn’t think we did.

One winter, when I was in middle school, I got really, really sick. For months I coughed painfully, gasping, wheezing and unable to catch my breath. I suffered. Sometimes I would cough until I threw up. My mom said she recognized the distinct sound of my cough.

“You’ve got whooping cough,” she told me.

I didn’t know what that was; I thought she was just referring to what I sounded like, because, yeah, when I tried to breathe in during one of my many violent coughing fits, I made a weird whooping noise.

“We all had that as kids. I remember it well,” my mother said, but since she didn’t take me to the doctor, I never received a formal diagnosis, or more importantly, treatment. I just fought through and after a while, it went away.

After that, whenever I caught even the slightest hint of a cold, the coughing would return. It was painful, embarrassing, and unpleasant. During the colder, drier months, I’d start coughing and couldn’t breathe when I laid down. It was miserable, and I dreaded winter because of it.