Blake’s Story

Blake’s Story

Broome Mum Naomi bravely shares a story very close to heart – the story of her son Blake, who’s death from whooping cough left the family shattered.


After six weeks and three days in hospital, we made the agonising choice to switch off Blake’s life support.  He had been fighting and fighting for so long, with no improvement.  The blood transfusions, the surfactant pumped into his lungs – nothing was working. Whooping cough had taken him from us, and it’s something I’ll never, ever forget.

Blake had been born at our local hospital in Broome just a couple of months earlier, much to the delight of his big sister Teisha who adored him.  We’d been careful to ensure that Teisha was up-to-date on her vaccines, and we planned to do the same with Blake – only he contracted whooping cough at just five weeks of age, too young at the time to be vaccinated. 

At first, doctors thought he had a cold.  Concerned, we pushed for more answers, and he was taken via the Royal Flying Doctors Service to Port Headland, where he stopped breathing.  It was awful.  They quickly intubated him and he was put on another emergency flight to Perth, then in an ambulance straight to intensive care.  We were besides ourselves.

He looked so tiny in his little bed, and so very sick.  After a week or so, we thought he had stabilised, which brought us some relief.  But then he developed pneumonia, and inflammation of the brain, and it all went downhill from there.  He became malnourished as he was having so much medication pumped into him, and a baby can only handle so much fluid.  The doctors really did try everything to save him.  We lost count of the number of drugs and medication they used.  Being so sick, he turned so many different colours – I called him my rainbow baby.  I desperately hoped that he would survive, although I knew he was at real risk of brain damage. 

Tragically, Blake died at just 11 weeks of age after a seven week battle in hospital.

They say time heals, but I don’t think we’ll ever really heal.  We just wish so badly that no other child should suffer in the way that Blake did. It’s just a cruel, insidious disease that no child should ever have to deal with.