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Katrina and Matt Hachinsky of Emporia, Kansas, had a healthy and happy 4-month-old girl, Megan, until three weeks after her diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis (DTP) vaccine.

Megan’s parents shared their daughter’s story with Polly Tommey, CHD.TV programming manager, during Children’s Health Defense’s (CHD) “Vax-Unvax” bus tour during its stop in Olathe, Kansas, on Aug. 26.

Megan, now 10, sat between her parents during the interview and said “Hi” to Polly.

Katrina told the story of how as a baby, Megan was advanced for her age, always “smiling [and]… making good eye contact and zerberts” (vocalizations) and “sitting up and playing with toys.”

At her routine four-month wellness checkup, Megan received the DTP vaccine.

“It was around Christmas time,” about three weeks later, Katrina recalled, when Megan experienced a health crisis.

“I was rushing off to work and took her to daycare,” Katrina said. That afternoon, Katrina got a call at work telling her to come to the hospital emergency room.

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That’s when she learned that after the babysitter put Megan down for a nap, she noticed the baby moving around and went to check on her.

“She was seizing and she [the babysitter] waited for her to stop and then had to resuscitate her and call 911 because she had stopped breathing,” Katrina recalled.

Arriving at the hospital, Katrina and Matt found Megan with her eyes closed and screaming. “Her limbs were purple, obviously. She’s been without oxygen for a while,” Katrina said. “They were drilling into her shin bone to give her medication as quickly as possible.”

Megan’s condition was so serious she had to be “life-flighted” to a hospital almost two hours away. “No one could go, she was on her own,” Katrina said. “There wasn’t room and they had to hurry.”

When Katrina and Matt got to the new hospital, the staff “wouldn’t really say anything to us,” Katrina said, because they had to rule out abuse as a cause for her injuries. The hospital performed skeletal tests and CT scans.

At that point, Megan seemed OK except that she was still crying and her eyes were not open. “I tried to nurse her and then I realized that she couldn’t,” Katrina said.

The next night, Megan started seizing again. Unable to stop it, the doctors put her into an induced coma for five days.

“They ran an MRI at that time and saw she had a severe brain injury due to the lack of oxygen,” Katrina said. “They brought us into the room and told us that she was never going to be normal again.”

The couple did not associate Megan’s condition with the vaccines until after they started a Facebook page and began receiving recommendations to learn about toxins and inflammation.

“And that led me to vaccines,” Katrina said.

“At one point they were telling us she wouldn’t be anything more than a vegetable,” Matt said. “So that was difficult for Mom to hear, but I think it also kind of lit a fire under all of us … when you start to realize that they’re not necessarily telling you the truth.”

Katrina and Matt learned Megan had developed a cortical visual impairment. “We just have to kind of play the guessing game with her vision,” Matt said. “She can’t verbalize what she can see.”

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Megan’s seizures abated by the time she was 1 but began again when she was 6. She had to be put into a medically induced coma again, after which she could no longer open her eyes, move her head or feed herself.

“We had to work our way back up to where we are now,” Katrina said.

Four years later, Megan can now “walk with assistance and she can stand and play ball,” Katrina said. “She can listen to books. She talks a little, but she can’t go play soccer with her friends or run around and talk and play on the playground.”

“She needs help with every aspect of her life,” Katrina said. “She can’t tell us what she wants, what she needs, when something hurts. … She just needs 24/7 care. I have to bathe her, feed her.”

The Hachinsky family shared some lighthearted back-and-forth before Megan, with help from her mom and dad, signed her name on the outside of the “Vax-Unvax” bus.

Katrina offered this advice to other parents:

“Do your own research. Don’t ever blindly trust anyone. And ask lots of questions. And if they can’t answer them, find someone who can.

“[Don’t] just blindly subject your child to something that you have no idea what’s in [it] and what the potential of harm is.”

Matt added:

“Just because they have that ‘doctor’ in front of their name doesn’t mean they know what they’re talking about. … Do your own research and use your own better judgment. You know your child better than any doctor, no matter what they tell you.”

Learn more about CHD’s “Vax-Unvax” bus tour and watch more interviews here.

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