To not forgive this (chicken pox related)

[JustLyra]

My youngest DD is CEV. She has numerous health problems and we’ve had to be very careful her whole life.

That has meant, especially since covid, finding a balance between protecting her, but making sure her siblings don’t live too limited a life. It’s not an easy balance and not one we always get 100% right.

Our policy with other people has always been - please give us a heads up if we’re due to spend time with you and we’ll risk assess it. We never expect other people to cancel their attendance at parties etc, if we don’t feel it’s safe enough for her then we miss out. All we ask is that we’re given the info.

People around us are generally really good. It’s been a bit problematic since the mindset of covid being over has come in, but generally we’ve muddled through ok.

Earlier in the summer one of my other kids, who is 8, was invited to a sleepover for a birthday - just her and the birthday kid. The parent of the birthday kid knows us very well and said there was no coughs, colds or anything in their home the afternoon I dropped DD3 off. Everything seemed fine and dandy.

A few days after the party I got a message saying that the birthday child had chicken pox. Sure as fate DD3 had caught them. DD4 then caught them and it was a horrid time as she ended up spending 6 days in hospital seriously ill.

To me it was one of those things and couldn’t be helped.

Except now it turns out that the birthday child was known to have CP before the party. The birthday mum told another mum because she felt guilty and that mum told her to tell us or she would.

Birthday child felt well with the CP and apparently “really really really wanted DD4 as their sleepover guest” so the parents decided to just not say anything because it “could” have happened that they didn’t know so we had decided to take that risk.

They’ve been apologetic, as in the Dad apologised very briefly, but they seem fixed on “but, if we hadn’t known them you wouldn’t have known” and that, to them, seems to make it ok. Whereas to me it really doesn’t make it ok.

I don’t want anything to do with them again. I don’t trust them and I’m furious that they’d take that risk with someone else’s child, especially in our situation.

and they don’t seem to grasp that even before I had my youngest I’d have been pissed off if someone deliberately hid that because who exposes another child to CP deliberately without their parents ok? What if the Mum was pregnant?

My AIBU is this - the kids met at an activity. During the holidays when it’s off we usually try and organise a few play dates so they don’t lose touch. It’s always them/their DD that asks. Mine is happy to meet up, but has never asked. This summer I’m thinking just not agreeing to any of the meet ups.

If my DD asks id need to re-assess, but I don’t think she will. Id rather just let the friendship fizzle to a weekly thing at their activity as that way it limits contact with the parents.

I too have a clinically vulnerable DD and this would make me furious.

My DD got CP from her older brother some years ago. As a proactive treatment, DD had a blood transfusion the day after her brother’s first spots appeared. DD ended up with a few spots 3 weeks later so it looked like quite a mild case but she still ended up in ICU with a CP pneumonia.

A lot of people don’t understand how serious CP can be, and to willingly expose a child to it (regardless of their or their siblings health needs) and not inform the parents, is bloody criminal. You have every right to feel furious.

Not rea the full thread sorry. But as a mum with a seriously immunosuppressed child I would be kicking off big time over this.

As others have posted CP can kill healthy kids.

I live in an area where you cannot have the CP vaccine so that has never been a choice for dd. She has to have antivirals everything there is an occurance in school.

Hope your dd is OK now @JustLyra

Are you the parent of the child who originally had the CP cos it’s attitudes like yours that put our vulnerable family members at risk.

As parents of CEV kids we deal with these types of unhelpful, judgey comments all the time. We physically see people roll their eye and we know that they are thinking “how dramatic” we are. We do the bloody best we can to balance up everybody’s needs. It is exhausting some days.

Maybe unroll your eyeballs from the back of your head and think about others.

@TicTac80 thank you for taking the precautions you think are necessary.

Re covid

i am guided by England public health guidance, which is

If someone in your household has coronavirus, the other family members can still go outside and go to school or work if they don’t have any symptoms. If they do have symptoms they should stay at home and do a self-test. If this self-test is positive the person must self-isolate.

If they change it to be that I should be testing my children even if they don’t have symptoms but I do, then I will follow accordingly.

And some people, like that poster, are still thankfully testing further than this to prevent children like their son unwittingly spreading covid to children like mine.

People may not be obliged to but folks like that make life much easier and safer for families like us.

They have made a child very ill, lost a friend. Lost their daughters friend

Hope they learned a lesson

Selfish gits

Yes but those that follow Public Health guidance shouldn’t be accused of disgraceful behaviour.

levy it at public health England! But until told otherwise by them, I will not test my children if they don’t have a single symptom but I test positive

Good for you. You have the family set up where you can afford to do that - some of us can’t.

Some of us can’t afford to say “well public England rules are that, so that’s what we’ll do even though we know it’s stupid”

To not test my children if they are showing absolutely no symptoms is stupid?

Well, yes, in my opinion it is.

you’re entitled to yours.

If someone in the house has covid testing everyone is the logical and sensible thing to do.

The reason the testing rules changed is fuck all to do with covid changing: we all know that.

Some families can afford to follow the guidance, regardless of how stupid it is.

I wish we were one of them, but we’re not.

alrhough this thread isn’t about covid. It’s about chicken pox.

Fair enough

@woody87 no not dramatic. I have seen how poorly some CEV people can get if precautions aren’t taken (and I promise you they can get seriously ill). And I know plenty of people (either relatives or friends) who are CEV. There are also class parents/kids/family members who are CEV in my children’s schools. They were CEV before the Pandemic started, and they are still CEV - even now in 2022 (because sadly that doesn’t really change just because the UK government have decided that the world can move on and take fewer precautions).

And when I KNOW I have covid, or I know my kids are sick with D&V/covid/CP/whatever, or I know that I have been in contact with people who have other infectious illnesses, then I will always err on side of caution, Stay home where appropriate and certainly give other parents a heads up if we are meant to be meeting them. And I will contact the schools/do tests if my children are sick or there is covid in my household. Not to be dramatic, but to give them the heads up and they can at least have full possession of the facts.

Even though I wear proper PPE at work. Even though I/they/their kids/my kids may have already been vaccinated.

FWIW, I’m a single parent to two DC on a nurse’s wage. I can’t afford to take time off work unpaid. But I also wouldn’t be able to look myself in the mirror, if I had been the cause of someone getting really poorly. Others can do what they want, that’s their business. For me, I prefer to be over cautious (I was before covid), honest and give people a heads up.

A comparison with Covid really rams home
how awful these people have been with the chicken pox, I think. Like @Ohthatsexciting, I would follow standard guidance as that’s what goes on throughout schools etc and nobody in our household is vulnerable. Probably so will most people in the schools @JustLyra‘s children attend - so, yes, Covid is out there and could come into their house by any route. But what these people have done is equivalent to realising their child has Covid symptoms, the child actually testing positive - and then asking @JustLyra‘s DD to sleepover without mentioning it to her, knowing she has a CEV child who needs to avoid it. And then telling her, when her vulnerable DD is really ill, “oh but it’s around everywhere and our DD might have had Covid with no symptoms, so then we wouldn’t have done a test and she wouldn’t have known she’d had it…..”. It’s a shockingly antisocial thing to do to anyone’s family - but when you actually know the circumstances (and know there’s someone in the house for whom it might well be really dangerous), it’s beyond contempt.

The dad's argument is ridiculous. I think my reply would be, 'Well, it's theoretically possible I could accidentally back my car into you as you come round a blind corner, so does that mean I should deliberately mow you down in the car park and not face any consequences since there are scenarios where it could have been an accident?'

OP, not only are you not being unreasonable I don't know how you haven't screamed at him that he's a repugnant, selfish, reckless, heartless, lying cunt.

Those parents are utterly vile. Imagine deciding that the possibility of your kid being a bit disappointed was somehow worse than risking the LIFE of another child. Fucking hell! And then trying to justify it to the mother of said child, after they'd been hospitalised!?

@JustLyra I hope your daughter is ok now. These parents are selfish, stupid idiots. I have no idea why anyone would behave as they did.

Your feelings about the other family are entirely justified. They behaved incredibly selfishly and I can understand them not wanting their birthday child to be disappointed but they did the wrong thing.

I don’t think it would be fair on your dd3 or her friend for you to cut off their friendship though. None of this is their fault, and even if the parents were in the wrong, your dds friendship clearly matters to their dd, and they don’t deserve to have that taken away from them.

Maintaining that friendship would involve OP having to have contact with a couple who withheld information they knew they should have shared, that endangered OP's DD's life and could have led to her losing it.

IMO it's ludicrous and incredibly unfair to suggest OP should do that.

@LilacPoppy seriously ???
Can you not read???

Tbh I’ve been thinking about this a lot.

The friendship isn’t that important to my DD. She’s happy seeing her each week at the activity undoubtedly. She never asks to organise anything at weekends or in the holidays. She wasn’t one of the children DD was desperate to see after lockdown. And when she had a small birthday thing this year with just 5 friends their DD wasn’t one of the people she chose.

I do think it is important to their DD. However, their DD is for them to care about. My children are for me to care about. I’m simply not prepared to put any effort into a friendship that DD3 isn’t that fussed about and doubly so when the parents have shown they don’t give a shit about my children’s health.

Are you literally only on this thread to annoy and goad?? You’ve already been vile earlier and comments deleted. You clearly are not bothered about others at all, so again, fuck off to the far end of fuck.

If your child is CEV why wasn't they given the chicken pox vaccine on the NHS?

Ah, I missed that was the same poster who’d commented on the number of children I have

Seriously?

How many times do I have to say this…

MY CHILDREN ARE VACCINATED

SOME VACCINATED PEOPLE STILL GET MILD CASES

THIS THEN CAN PASS TO THEIR SIBLING WHO DIDN’T DEVELOP IMMUNITY

Shame there isn't a fuckwit vaccine

Have you tried reading the thread?