Last year, my wife and I found out she was pregnant. We were very excited about this. Unfortunately, she got the flu after a couple weeks of being pregnant. In October, my wife gave birth to a little baby girl. We’d had the anatomy scans but they missed the open hole in her back. She has Spina Bifida, a condition that’s thought to occur due to a failure of spinal formation around the 18th day of pregnancy. Normally it’s blamed on a folate deficiency, but it can also happen due to illness during pregnancy. She’s coming home tomorrow, as she’s been in the hospital all these long months. It’s been a very emotional and challenging several months.

I’m almost certain the flu vaccine would have prevented this as I had gotten the flu vaccine and she had not. Only she got sick. We’ll never know for sure what caused it, because that’s just not how this kind of thing works, but our daughter is looking at a life of having to give herself catheters and enemas and likely kidney failure in her 60s because of her condition.

If we could go back in time she’d have gotten that vaccine in a heartbeat. It just hadn’t occurred to her as a thing to do.

Edit: accidentally repeated myself