My story is a long one. And so is my journey. But I will try to keep it short...the story - not the journey.
I am the single mother of four kids. When my eldest (now 15 years old) was born, and before that, I knew nothing.
I thought I knew a lot because I had travelled and because I was educated.
Yes, I knew about different people, with different cultures in different countries and I even still remembered a lot from what I'd learned in school and college, but in other areas I was completely ignorant.

In the clutches of the system

Now, I had always been quite the nature person. So certain things were already sure for me before I ever had kids.
When people asked me if I was going to feed my baby formula or breastfeed, I was almost insulted that they asked.
Even from a young age I found it strange that women would prefer to prepare a powdered substitute from a cow when they had the proper food with them at all times. I knew instinctively that a home birth would be better and more comfortable than a hospital birth. But there is where the knowledge about parenting ended.

Not long after my daughter's birth, I was bombarded with new information. Brochures and time tables were presented and I felt like I was going to an IT convention rather than being a mother.
System overload!
Because I was still living in a bubble and partly blind, deaf and just plain stupid but also because I still believed that the medical world, our public health nurse etc. had the best interest of our children at heart.
Stupid, I know. I can't even blame it being young, because I was 28 years old. I do however blame it on my ignorance and my blind belief in a system that is set up for failure.
So because of that I went along with all they asked of me, including vaccinations.
A choice I regretted ever since and probably for the rest of my life.

How vaccines injured my child and changed our lives

I remember freaking out because my daughter was only 8 months old and they just started the vaccinations for MenC in babies of 13 months. I went to see our GP and demanded she should be vaccinated for this now, because how else would she be protected in case of an outbreak? The GP told me that kids with the greatest risk were 13 months or older, or teens.
Now of course, I know this is the craziest argument ever, but at the time I believed it and even though I was still scared for her life, I went home.
I now realise that the scare tactics the MSM uses by reporting on these outbreaks worked their wonders with me.
Now we did live in the Netherlands at the time, so our vaccination schedule is probably not the same as elsewhere.
The thing is: She was supposed to have her first vaccine at the age of 4 weeks and my every instinct told me that it was too much too early so I waited till she was about 10 weeks.
Now I wish I would have followed up on that instinct and researched.
But because we were a bit behind on the schedule, everything was moved up a bit.
She received all the vaccinations as recommended for the first year, but all a little later.
They never seemed to cause any problems besides the common fever.
That is, until she received her second or third vaccination for pertussis.
It still beats me why so many are needed to protect from an illness that rarely is a danger to an older child.

The change overnight

My daughter was about 11 months old when she received her second or third shot for pertussis.
That night everything changed.
In the first bit of the night, she had a light fever, nothing notable. I put her in bed and she fell asleep almost right away.
I was in the living room when I heard a very high pitched scream coming from her.
A terrible feeling came over me, I dropped everything and ran to her.
She was still screaming, crying uncontrollably and calling for me.
When I took her in my arms I felt she was burning up but she pushed me away from her.
I put her back into her bed to get the thermometer but she wouldn't have it.
But every time I picked her up she didn't want to be there and when I put her down, she'd scream: 'Mommy!'
This went on for the rest of the night. I would tell her: 'Mommy's here.' And she'd look at me and scream: 'NOOOO!!!'
As soon as the daylight broke through, I rang the doctor and we sat in his office at 8 am.
But everything that was going on during the night had disappeared. The fever was gone and she was even giggling at the doctor.
He told me it must have been a reaction to the vaccines the day before and that it was quite normal for her to have a fever and the response she had.
So we went home.
I never really thought of it again and even forgot the incident completely for a while.

Nightmares? Or something else?

Not long after this incident, my daughter started to get nightmares, or so it seemed. She would be screaming her lungs out and could not be comforted. She would hit, kick and scream to get away and it was almost like she wasn't really awake, but almost like sleep walking and talking. This went on for quite some time and was witnessed by numerous friends that would be there when this happened. It could go on for hours sometimes and it was almost like she didn't recognise me or anyone else, but she'd look straight at me.
And then, all of a sudden, it would stop, I'd see a change in her eyes and she wouldn't remember a thing of what she did or said.

Then one day she sat on the couch and one side of her face had dropped and she was babbling but incoherently.
Scared that she had a brain haemorrhage, I sped to the hospital with her.
Immediately they reassured me that it was nothing serious, but they still wanted to do some tests.
A few weeks and some tests later the results were in. My daughter had epilepsy.
I was very surprised as the only form of epilepsy I knew was when someone was shaking uncontrollably and fell to the ground.
The doctor told me that there was a form of epilepsy when this didn't happen, but instead the person affected would have fits that looked like nightmares, being awake but not really.
So this was what she had been suffering all these years.
She was 5 now and somehow I still didn't connect the dots.

Not long after this, I changed GP's. Instead of the regular doctor, we now had a wonderful GP who besides the full study for regular medicine had also studied Anthroposophical medicine.
This man has opened my eyes to so many things and made so many things right that had been wrong for a long time.
I spoke to him about what was going on with my daughter and he kept asking and asking.
We must have been in his office for over an hour, something that never happened in any doctor's office.
He even cancelled a meeting because he wanted to deal with our problem first.
Then he asked the million dollar question: 'When did this all start?'
I thought back and first said that it started a few years back, but then I remembered.
It had all started that night after her vaccination. That was the first time.
He said nothing, he just stared at me. I had figured it out myself. I remember how the tears came up and I whispered:
'That's it isn't it? It was the vaccine?'
He still didn't say anything, grabbed the photo frame of his family behind him and put it on the desk facing me.
The picture showed his family. Him, his wife, and five beautiful children.
He pointed at the older boy in the wheel chair.
'This is Tim,' he said. 'Tim was the perfect happy baby, he was meeting all his milestones, he had just started to sit up on his own and made attempts to start crawling. He was always happy and never cried.'
I looked at the boy and my tears were running down my face.
He continued: 'About an hour after his routine vaccinations, he got a fever. His eyes rolled into the back of his head and he cried non stop. We took him to the ER where he had six seizures in less than one hour. The hospital staff told us it was a coincidence, but we knew better. I was young, still in medical school and thought I was doing the right thing.
He was never that bright, happy child again. He has around 20 seizures a day since and he has brain damage. Our Tim will never be able to walk, talk or play. We had 4 more children and they have never seen a needle in their lives. If I had only known then what I know now.'
I saw tears running down my doctors cheeks and I was crying with him.
When we left his office, he gave me and my daughter a hug.
We'd been lucky. Her version wasn't as bad as Tim's. But still.

After this, we've tried alternative medicine and I can honestly say that the nightmares aren't what they were.
My girl is a beautiful 15 year old now, and besides the odd 'nightmare' she's perfectly normal.

We were lucky. Tim wasn't.

Thank you for reading. My name is Miriam and I am a single parent and I live in Ireland with my 4 beautiful kids.
The other three are un-vaccinated.
We home school, un-school and worldschool. I will continue to write about our journey as a worldschool family.
If you've missed my introduction, you can find it here:
https://steemit.com/introduceyourself/@misslasvegas/introduction-and-my-very-first-post-finally