Get your flu shot. Get your COVID boosters. Get every vaccine your doctor recommends. Hell, these days, ask your doctor if there are more vaccines you should be getting.

May we be able to tell many more stories about people who didn't get sick.

Pertussis is highly, highly contagious. All of these people stayed healthy because they were vaccinated. My sister was safe from becoming one of the 1 in 200 under 1s who die of whooping cough because she was vaccinated on time.

I can say that my parents were not too sick to care for me because they also did not catch a cough, which can last for months.
I can say that my baby sister, around a year old at the time, did not catch a disease, which often causes babies to stop breathing.

I was diagnosed with pertussis. Also known as whooping cough.
I can't say if the vaccine I received (3 doses starting at six weeks) saved my life. I can say that none of the many extended family members I interacted with at the lake during a time I would have been infectious caught the disease.

Then suddenly I was in an examination room. In my memory, everything in the room is blindingly bright white after having been in the dark bedroom with the bean bag.
I don't remember the examination. Only that before they started, someone pulled a purple teddy bear out of a cabinet for me to hold.

I couldn't sleep. Sometimes, I would cough for so long I would be breathless afterward. But it only hurt a little. I seemed fine.
Eventually, though, the shortness of breath became concerning and my parents called an ambulance.
I remember being in the ambulance briefly.

As I lay sweating on a red bean bag in my uncle's lake house in the middle of the night, my parents were worried because I could not stop coughing.
I am not sure how many hours I had spent coughing as what had seemed like the flu only a few hours before suddenly became much scarier.