My name is Carly, I'm originally from Brisbane, my husband's from the US.
We've got five children, we have a 7-year-old.
We have my daughter, Mabel, who would be three and then we have brand new triplets.
They're six weeks old, so family of seven.
So Mabel was 6 1/2 months old when we ended up in hospital.
Prior to that, she was a hundred percent healthy.
She had never even had a cold.
One night, put her to bed as normal.
About 11 o'clock that evening, she vomited.
She was quite restless then throughout the night, vomited a few times, which is not uncommon in things like gastro in really small children.
The next morning, we're a bit concerned.
She wouldn't really eat anything, she wouldn't really take any milk.
So we went to the children's hospital and she was observed.
Some of the symptoms that she had were things like a bit of a fever, she had vomiting.
We stayed overnight.
She was really lethargic, but also really unsettled, waking every five minutes.
My husband had come back in, he was holding Mabel.
Mabel finally fell asleep without being unsettled.
You think "Finally, they're getting some rest."
Unfortunately, from that point, she never opened her eyes again.
I'd actually popped out for a little bit home to have a shower, and I was, on my way back,
I got a really frantic phone call saying to park in the emergency bay, to immediately come back in, which I did very quickly.
I came back in.
My daughter was in red zone, in resus, with lots of tubes and lots of people around her.
Obviously, we were really concerned.
They'd realised it's something worse than gastro, something worse than UTI, potentially some sort of sepsis meningitis caused by something like a pneumococcal bacteria.
We went to the ICU where we spent a week and unfortunately never got to take her home again.
This morning, we took our triplets to get immunised under the National Immunisation Program.
If anyone is hesitant in getting their child vaccinated, whether the reason is they think their child's scared of needles, they don't want to see their child crying with a needle.
I mean, no one wants to see that.
But ultimately, first of all, your baby's not going to remember getting their vaccination.
And I guess secondly, consider the alternative,
where you see them in the ICU and then, in our case, not leaving with your child. This is something that there's no way we thought we would ever lose a child, let alone to something that, in a lot of cases is vaccine preventable.
In my mind, any sort of hesitancy to vaccinate your child is completely and utterly misplaced.
Why wouldn't you protect against the things that you can?
If your child was in front of a bus that was about to hit them, would you run and move them out of the way?
Of course you would.
These diseases are buses that we can't see.
So if we can protect them with a vaccination, then you have to do it