I believe in vaccines and encourage my children to get them. However, N2 had a bad reaction to her first set of shots at 2 months old. A few days after her shots, she screamed a high-pitched scream and stared, unseeing, into the void. This was due to seizures. Luckily, this reaction was listed in the handout on the DTaP vaccine. It was due to the "aP" part- acellular Pertussis- of the vaccine. Interestingly,, they developed the aP to deal with bad reactions to the old "P" vaccine. All that to say, N2 will never get a pertussis vaccine again. She never caught the disease even though she was indirectly exposed once. And we are all very much pro-vaccine even so. I had the chicken pox at age 17- before the vaccine came out. Caught it from a girl I babysat. It was pretty miserable. One night, in the middle of the night, I got up feeling very bad. I sat in the chair next to my mom's bed. (My dad was away on a business trip.). I didn't want to wake my mom up because she was always grumpy when she was woken up. I remember falling forward. The next thing I knew I woke up in a cold sweat laying on my parents' bed. My mom was there with my sister. I'd had a seizure. My sister caught chicken pox from me and was just at the cut off for being allowed to travel with us to Europe for a worldwide youth choral competition.