Chadwick Boseman attends the Heavenly Bodies: Fashion & The Catholic Imagination Costume Institute Gala at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on May 7, 2018 in New York City.
I was telling someone about how I got chickenpox cause my ma made me hang out with my sister and sleep in her roomwhen she’d had it and they were like “YOUR MOM WAS ANTIVAX???”
And, like, no, calm down, fren. I’m just old. There hadn’t had a vaccine for chickenpox then
*Old Man Voice* Back in my day, we had to play Russian roulette with our kids about being one of the ~9K hospitalizations and or ~100 deaths a year from chickenpox. Also, everyone born in the mid-80s and earlier is prolly gonna get scabies, so, there’s that
Vaccinate your kids, guys!
Yep. I remember the week all 3 of us had chicken pox, and how freaked out my mom was bc we had just been to a bbq and I had held someone’s brand new baby.
Like I got home and found the first pox on my arms and side and my mom rightly freaked the whole hell out.
The baby was fine but our nerves were all on edge for a bit. I felt so guilty even though I had no way to know before I found the pox on my side.
And that’s the thing, the vaccine would have not just prevented me from suffering, but protected that baby who was too young. Couple kids in my class went to the hospital that summer, too.
Plus shingles are the worst, I’m told. Friends have had them. I want the shingles vaccine but i’m too young yet.
It was a slow moving wave through my first grade class. I was the second to last to get it, probably caught it from my friend Wendi who’d was just finishing up her bout from it. I remember we found the first pox on a weekend zoo trip (I was scratching at a bump on my stomach and my parents had the “well crap” moment). But yeah, that was the prevaccine life.
Mine was during the summer and we could hear the swim meet from our house that Saturday. That’s the thing I remember most tbh. I started swim team at 4 (really tho we were exhibition swimming until we were 6, I was just too bossy for swim lessons and already knew how to swim) aaaand it was like EVERYTHING to me every summer.
Missing the swim meet was THE WORST.
That *old* person feel of remembering you mom calling all your friend’s parents to see who was healthy so they could come over, play, and hopefully catch chicken pox from you when they didn’t already have a cold, and be done with it.
Yeah, my mom made us all 3 sleep in one bed until we’d all got it.
I just had to look up when the chickenpox vaccine was released in the States. I was 8. I still forget that the vaccine exists.
And yet I can’t remember getting it. Either I was one of the lucky ones, or I got it so young that my memory is really bad. Which honestly could be… any time. I remember getting sick, but not what with!
It rolled through my fifth grade year like some kind of itchy tsunami. I’d already had it as a baby, and my sister had it when I was in second grade, so my mom figured we would be fine.
As it turned out, I was one of those kids who gets the damn thing twice. Didn’t catch it from my sister, for some reason, but I got it when it hit the fifth grade. I don’t remember much about it except being super uncomfortable.
By the time the vaccine was released, I was in college.
Notice to parents in 2018, get your kids vaccinated
Meanwhille, at my house, I just remember being in a major quarantine because my family was terrified I’d give it to my dad (who never had it as a child) or my brother (who was a cardiac patient). That and oatmeal baths, I remember oatmeal baths
My sister brought it home from school and gave it to me (age 4) and my brother (age 2). I have no memory of it, but I do remember it going through the rest of my first grade class, including the girl who got them so bad she had pox in her mouth. D:
I’ve got chickenpox scars on my face because, while I followed instructions and didn’t scratch when I was awake, there was nothing my parents could really do to make me not scratch while I was asleep. Wearing socks on my hands didn’t really work out.
The only thing I really remember is being at home and my school posting work from me to do. Which, since I was 4, was basically just colouring in.
Of course, this was also around the time one of my older cousins was at university here and he’d been round to visit before flying back to Malaysia. As I didn’t get any spots until after he’d arrived back in Malaysia, there wasn’t anything he could really do about being infected himself (probably infecting loads of people on a 14hr flight) and then infecting a good portion of my family in Malaysia (at the time there would have been 8 of my mum’s siblings there, with their spouses, and maybe I would have had 12 cousins). There were a LOT of people to infect and the cousin who had been studying here and one of my uncles got it pretty bad because they were already adults.
I have no idea about the people on the plane that would have been infected, but…. that’s a lot of people to potentially get chickenpox and then spread it to their families too. :/
