Hi BarmCakes
I can understand you are worried, but wanted to give you a good-news story. My mum has/had hep C. She was probably infected at 20, and is now over 50, with normal life expectancy, and no health problems because of the hep C.
She was diagnosed 15 years ago, and underwent an intensive treatment (regular injections) for 6 months. This was still fairly experimental back then I think, but was very sucessful, and I believe the virus is not detectable in her blood anymore.
The treatment meant she could not work at that time, as she got quite a lot of side effects, but i believe the treatment is now improved, and you only have to do it for 3 months. I might be wrong on the details though, just going by what i remember her telling me.
You mention that you are worried about giving it to your children. Your past and present partners and children will need to be checked, but the chance of infection is fairly low (i just googled and it say 1 in 20 chance, but not sure if that is the most up-to-date statistics).
My mother had it for 15 years without knowing and in that time got married to my dad and had me and my brother (vaginal birth, breastfeeding) and neither of us got infected, so please try not to worry.
Re telling people: My mum told her family and some friends. I actually do not know if she told her employers, she work with children like yourself. She certainly did not inform the parents of her pupils. I see no reason to, as a child care professional you should anyway always use gloves when you take care of children who are injured. And you can't catch it without blood-to-blood-contact.
She also didn't tell the parents of my friends, again i see no reason to do so.
She told me,(after i had been tested), i was about 12, but she didn't tell my little brother until he was 18.
I think my mother was worried that people who did not know her well would judge, thinking she got it from sharing needles (she didn't, she caught it from her first boyfriend, he probably was a drug user but she didn't know that). She has unfortunately also experienced that some health care professionals assume that she has caught it from injecting drugs and treating her differently because of it. Which is a shame, but I can understand that for that reason you might, want to keep it private, not that you should have to, but if you want to, you should, I think .
I have respected her privacy and never told anyone, except one ex-boyfriend ?partly because I wanted him to understand why I wanted him to get tested for STDs before we stopped using condoms? Since she is now pretty much recovered there is no reason to
tell anyone now really.
Sorry, this post is getting very long, but just wanted to say one more thing.
As i said, i see no reason why you should tell people other than those close to you , who you would like to know. However, if you will be visibly ill/off work etc meaning that people who don't know you have hep C will notice, please make up a standard excuse that your children can tell people.
I remember my mother being off work when she had the treatment, and when friends and neighbours asked why, i just had to vaguely say that she was ill, as far as i remember i didn?t know specifically what to say, and that was a bit difficult for me. If your children is very young that might not apply anyway.
In short: Hep C certainly don?t have to be a death sentence, the chance of infecting anyone is very small, and you are perfectly in your right to keep it private.
I wish you luck, take care