Kathryn Alcaide watched whooping cough destroy her son’s tiny body and now urges everyone to get vaccinated to protect their families
Kathryn Alcaide was thrilled when she got pregnant in 2011. She had two daughters, Madison, now 18, and Samara, now 21, from a previous relationship. But for her and her husband Jonathan, a new baby was exciting. “I really wanted a boy,” Alcaide tells PEOPLE. Her daughters “mirrored the same feeling I did. They were all rooting for a boy because we were a family full of girls.”
When Brady was born, “I felt complete,” Alcaide says. But two months later, he developed a bad cough. It quickly progressed, and on January 28, 2012, Brady died from what the family would later confirm was pertussis, or whooping cough. According to the Mayo Clinic, symptoms start as mild —runny nose, watery eyes, fever, cough — but become more severe 5 to 10 days after infection. The telltale sign is a high-pitched noise that sounds like a “whoop” when a child tries to breathe in after coughing.
Babies cannot get their first dose of the DTaP vaccine, which protects against whooping cough, until they are two months old. That’s why the vaccine is also recommended for people who will have close contact with babies, according to the Mayo Clinic. And in 2012, the CDC also began recommending women get a booster shot while pregnant.
Today, whooping cough mainly affects children too young for the vaccine, and cases are skyrocketing. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, whooping cough cases are more than double what they were this time last year. Alcaide is urging others to protect themselves — and the most vulnerable members of their family — from whooping cough.
Alcaide shares her story with PEOPLE’s Cara Lynn Shultz.
When I was pregnant with Brady, we knew he was a larger baby — a little brute. The delivery was pretty difficult because he was so big. I think I was in labor for almost 11 hours. It was an all-day effort, but Brady was born on at 11:37 pm on November 20th, 2011. When he was born, it was amazing: my first boy, that connection with a mother and a son. Our family felt complete. And as a mom, I felt complete.
Brady came out ready to rock and roll. His cheeks were so, so chubby. In the pictures, it looks like he’s a little peanut, but he was a big boy.
He had just started to laugh around the time he got sick. I was singing “I’m a Little Teapot” and doing the motions with his hands. We actually put that on his tombstone — “I’m a Little Teapot” — because that was the first and the last time that I heard him laugh.
He started to get sick around Christmas, so he was only a month old. At first, it was just cold-like symptoms. Around 6 weeks is when started to decline. When his fever spiked to 104 on January 9, 2012, we took Brady to the emergency room. They ran tests for flu and RSV, and all tests came back negative. We thought, “Great, just a cold.” We had a follow-up with our pediatrician and were given the same diagnosis.
But Brady was clearly getting worse. On January 11, we went back to the pediatrician’s office because his breathing was so worrisome. He was struggling to breathe when he coughed — it was almost like he was trying to catch his breath. It was a very wet cough, and so he would cough, cough, cough, sometimes until he spat up. The doctors still thought it was just a respiratory virus. They recommended we buy a humidifier, so we did. He was doing the nebulizer. We were just trying to maneuver through these symptoms by patting his back, keeping him upright.
On January 16 we went to the emergency room because his breathing was terrible. And I remember the girls were with us because it was Martin Luther King Day. When you looked at Brady, you could see he was struggling to breathe — it almost looked like a suction around the bottom of the ribs, and they call that retractions. It means that they’re struggling to pull in the air and it’s squeezing around the ribs. And that’s what was happening to him. I remember nurses listening with their stethoscopes, and they’re like, “We need to admit you.”
That was the last day the girls saw their brother.
They gave us a room where the doctors would come in with their full PPE. His crib had a covering on it. He tested negative for RSV again. They were like, “We still don’t know.” It just was never even considered that it could have been whooping cough.
By January 23, Brady’s condition had not improved. Finally, after eight days, they started him on antibiotics. That’s when they finally said it was whooping cough and he would need to stay in the hospital for five days.
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But it was looking bad. Brady was just kind of quiet. He didn’t look like himself. He had a lot of IV fluids, was getting the albuterol. He got really puffy, very swollen, just laying in his crib. I was sitting in the rocking chair with him in the hospital, kind of like looking down at him with the oxygen, the feeding tube. Sometimes you got a smile out of him.
The nebulizer treatments would spike his heart rate, so he would shake. I remember obsessively watching over his stats, seeing his heart race. His heart was really pumping. And I just remember seeing that this was taking a huge toll on his body. His oxygen rate was still down, so he ended up being put on a ventilator to help with his breathing.
I was still hopeful that we’d get through it — I even thought we would all go on a vacation after this. All I wanted was for him to be back healthy. I thought about him playing baseball. I just wanted him to be able to go out there and swing a bat and throw a ball.
On January 27, they decided to move Brady to Boston Children’s Hospital. They were trying to get him stable enough to be able to move. He’d already endured 10 days of constant stress. I didn’t want to move Brady until he got baptized. I had a really bad, bad feeling about this. It was freezing rain and we couldn’t take the helicopter, so we had to take the ambulance.
I was looking at it as a mom: This is my baby, and things are not working in our favor. I was talking to someone about the move, and a priest just happened to walk by. He held my hand and we rushed into the room because they were getting him stable and taking him off all the machines and getting him ready. He baptized Brady as were running to the ambulance. Because of the state that Brady was in, they had security holding the doors. When I say running, we’re running like in those ER shows. He baptized Brady as we were leaving through the double doors and getting onto the elevator.
We were in the ambulance, halfway to the hospital, when Brady’s heart stopped. They had to give him compressions the rest of the way to Boston Children’s. We were worried about brain injury, because he was deprived of oxygen.
On January 28, we were told he had no brain activity. The ECMO machine was keeping him alive. So we had to decide what we were going to do. I got to sit with Brady while he was on the heart and lung bypass, and I knew that he was already gone. They were able to put him in his blanket and we sat in a room with him. Just a chaplain, Jon and I.
Brady passed away with me holding him at 2:53 pm.
After he passed, the nurses did his handprints and his footprints for us. A nurse tried to give me his blanket, but I asked her to keep his blanket with him because he was going to be cold. She was like, “Okay, I’ll make sure it stays with him.” I just remember the car ride home. The emptiness we felt. We went into the hospital with our son and we’re leaving without him. He was not with me, he was so far away. It was the worst drive of my life. Then we had to tell our girls.
They officially diagnosed him with whooping cough a couple of weeks later. They think he got it from an un-boostered adult who had minimal symptoms.
When I got pregnant again, the CDC was recommending the Tdap shot for pregnant women. When I got it, it was very emotional. Just a ball of emotion. I made sure family members were getting their shots as well. I welcomed my son Jaxon on April 5, 2013.
Whooping cough takes such a toll on a little baby’s body. Everything that that disease does to your internal organs, overworking them to where your body starts shutting down, it’s too much for them to get through. As parents, we make a promise to be able to protect them and to keep them healthy.
It’s why I advocate for Vaccinate Your Family. I’ve seen what it does to not only Brady, but I saw what it did to our family. I saw the long-term psychological effects. So many things in your future just changes.
Seeing his heart rate increase. The shakes. The nebulizers. The car. Not being able to keep down food. The feeding tube.
It’s not just about the cough.
Multiple large-scale studies have found that vaccines are safe. There is no scientific link between vaccines and autism, according to the Centers for Disease Control.
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