i rly wanna know like americans and non-americans- were u immunised against chicken pox or did ur parents rather u just get infected as a child??
I was born just a few years before the vaccine was even available, and I contracted chickenpox before the vaccine was part of routine vaccination (and mandatory in schools).
Which doesn’t sound so bad on its own, but at sixteen my immune system collapsed, and the previous mild case of chickenpox I had at nine suddenly gave me a violent and atypical case of shingles. My whole damn body was covered in pustules, even down my throat. Wherever there was skin, it was covered in pox. I nearly died. The doctors told my mother if she had waited just two more hours to get me to the hospital in Indy (my hometown hospital refused to even give me an E.R. bed ‘because it’s just chickenpox’, despite our pleas that I was immunocompromised), I would have died.
I was out of school for three months with a PICC line going straight to my heart pumping acyclovir into me even after I was discharged from the PICU. I never recovered academically and I ended up forced out of school the next year because they hated that I was wrecking attendance records with my frequent illnesses.
It’s only in the last five years that most of the pox scars have faded. I was sixteen then. I’m thirty now.
People/parents love to think that chickenpox is a normal and harmless part of childhood, almost a right of passage. Oh it’s just a week or so if mild itching, life will go on. No need to get my child vaccinated. Hell, let’s intentionally infect our young child by hosting chickenpox party! Better to have it at a young age, they say! But I wasn’t immunocompromised yet when I got chickenpox at 9. And at sixteen that same “harmless” virus latent within me nearly killed me. And even with the basic chickenpox, things can and have gone catastrophically wrong. Your perfectly healthy kid might come into contact with another kid on chemo. Suddenly that kid can die just like I almost did. Even your perfectly healthy kid can have a freak reaction and be killed by chickenpox.
The chickenpox vaccine has been around and available for over two decades now. Chickenpox and further complications like shingles are completely avoidable. Get your kid vaccinated
A vaccine wasn’t available when I was a kid so I picked it up at the age of four. My brother’s best friend came to visit and sat with me awhile to cheer me up- only to catch them himself at 15. He took them home to his dad- never had them. Half his family ended up in the hospital and his dad nearly died. Get your vaccines, folks.