Wwyd vulnerable mum

[HalloweenGhost]

I've NC because I post a lot about all sorts of stuff but this could be recognisable, and am posting in aibu for traffic, but I think I can kind of guess the responses I'm going to get. Please be gentle, I am looking for shared experiences from people in a similar situation.

DC was in reception part time last year.
We were friends with another family whose mum/wife during covid made a bubble with me because I had severe pnd.

Through that contact I caught covid in the tail end of the pandemic. It gave me acute kidney injury. Same family 6 months later gave us all tonsillitis - I'm pretty sure it came from them because the dc kissed my dc on the mouth while he had it. Whether it ultimately did not come from them is not the true point of the story and I never mentioned it to them or laid blame, but just trying to give some background for the main question.

When I got the tonsillitis, my kidney function dropped to about 20% and I was hospitalised. I also caught covid again at a similar time, so three respiratory illnesses in 6 months.

The children also suffered badly with it and we had the whole summer with them really quite unwell, daily vomiting, etc.

Anyway dc started at reception and I was quite nervous, as I know children mixing can bring more bugs home.

However I have since gleaned that the opinion on mumsnet and amongst schools is that it's normal to go to school whilst infectious. I was reminded of this when reading the covid thread with the school that didn't recommend testing children. Alongside this, talking about something unrelated to me, my friend said that no way would she keep her kids off school if they were ill.

Anyway we moved house and dc is only 4 so I thought we'd wait until September to send them to a new school.

But my question is, if you as the parent are vulnerable to typical bugs and/or covid, how do you manage with school?

Should I ask school to let me know if there is illness so I can keep dc home? Should I just accept that I'm probably going to have to live with getting ill, even though it could lead to further kidney injury? I'm in a bit of a fog about this.

I completely understand your dilemma! I am immunosuppressed and also have a heart condition that has tried to unalive me on more than one occasion. In particular, stomach bugs used to be a guaranteed trip to resus as they nearly always triggered an arrhythmia.

Having said that, I haven’t asked the school to keep me informed if other children are unwell. I know lots of parents in DSs year group wouldn’t send their sick kids to school anyway, but if DS does pick something up then our focus is at home and me trying to avoid catching it (for example, if he is sick and misses the toilet/bowl then DH would clean it up). Unfortunately you can’t protect them from catching germs and it’s actually super important for their immune systems to develop by catching these types of viruses, it just really sucks for us adults!

I would suggest looking at how you can minimise the risk of catching things from your children instead of contacting the school.

Thank you for your reply! How do you do that? Some things are catching before they are obvious, and DC is very cuddly and, or passes things to DC2 who is very small and needs to be handled by me. I seem to pick up whatever they get sadly

I have incurable cancer and so am on treatment that makes me immunosurpressed. If there are any significant bugs at school, like chicken pox or something then the head phones me to let me know and gives me the option to keep the kids off. I never do though. We get bugs yes, but we muddle through. Unfortunately there isn't much that can be done to avoid them. I know it's hard when you've had awful experiences with illness but I'd just advise you to try and talk to someone about your anxieties about this.

Thank you. I think if I'm anxious about it, it's not that I'm concerned that I will catch things more easily, but rather that if I continue catching upper respiratory infections, I will be causing further damage to my kidneys that could ultimately lead to end stage renal failure.
I don't know what to do.

We do a mixture of things, proper hand washing for all, good hygiene around coughs and sneezes etc, when there are germs I try to minimise physical contact as much as is fair to DS but as he is 10 it really isn’t as much of an issue now, mainly asking him to not breathe in my face 😂 My DH will take over more than his usual share of parenting as well just to minimise my exposure to it all. It’s not fool proof by any means but it does help. Another thing that helped massively was getting the pneumonia jab, owing to previous bouts of pneumonia and PEs, every cough and cold virus went on to my chest and made me so unwell, needing multiple rounds of antibiotics but I’ve definitely noticed an improvement in that since I had the jab.