I feel so guilty for dismissing my 10 year old daughter’s symptoms as “just” a cough…but I wonder how much worse it could have been if we had skipped the whooping cough vaccine.

About two months ago, in mid-March, my daughter started coughing.

I admit that I was blithely indifferent. Frankie is almost 11 years old and generally quite sturdy. She is rarely ill and it would never have crossed my mind to make an appointment with a GP about this.

After all, it was “just” a cough, albeit a rather unpleasant one.

There was no runny nose, no temperature and she didn’t feel bad. But when it got worse after a few weeks, at the start of the Easter weekend, it became the kind of deep, phlegmatic barking that people started commenting on. “It’s a really nasty cough,” they said. And it was.

Several times a day it would invade her body, leaving her breathless. Her eyes watered from the effort, her face reddened and she had to grab onto the furniture for support.

I knew there wasn’t much a GP could do, but the situation became much more serious when Frankie started vomiting every time the cough took over.

It was horrible to watch. The cough would start out of nowhere and after 10-15 seconds of difficulty breathing she was sick. She told us she felt like there was a blockage preventing her from breathing.

This became even more concerning when we started finding pools of vomit near his bed in the morning. The idea that she could suffocate overnight was terrifying.

After she was sent home from school two weeks ago because of vomiting, I finally took her to see our GP.

I had begun to see reports of an increase in whooping cough and had read an account of someone who, like Frankie, had vomited violently. The idea that I might have inadvertently overlooked something so serious – and contagious – filled me with terrible guilt.

However, Frankie was vaccinated against whooping cough. Additionally, when I was pregnant with her, I was among the first cohort of women to also receive a vaccine when it was introduced in the UK in October 2012.

Frankie vomited three times during her appointment with the GP, who saw how much the cough was consuming her.

However, when I suggested whooping cough, he felt it was unlikely given his vaccination history. He thought her persistent cough was exacerbating an overactive gag reflex and recommended Strepsils.

But the next day he called me. “I’ve been thinking about it,” he said, “and I think you might be right about the whooping cough. It seems that general practitioners do not know this.

He notified the local health protection team, who gave him a test and prescribed a course of antibiotics.

We are still waiting for the results, which I am told could take several weeks. And Frankie still coughs intermittently so violently it makes her sick.

I feel bad for ignoring something so serious – and worse, that she might have passed it on to someone more vulnerable.

My thoughts are with the families who have lost a child to whooping cough. Deep down, I wonder how much worse it could have been if we had skipped the vaccine ourselves.