Having Chickenpox at 32 years

When I was in school, I often heard children getting chicken pox and how we were not supposed to go near them. We learnt about contagious diseases and chicken pox was one of them. Fortunately, or unfortunately I never contracted chicken pox in my childhood. But I never knew it was something I had to worry about at 32 years of age being a mother of 20 months old.

I was in Chandigarh , in my hometown , at my in laws place. We had come here to attend a couple of family functions. My cousin was going to get married in 6 days. I was so excited for him and to attend his wedding. All of our cousin gang is out of india, I am the only one in India. So obviously I was more excited and a little bit sad as well, as none of the cousins were going to make it for his wedding.

We had thrown a welcome to the family dinner for my brother-in-law’s wife who recently got married. And next day we had gone out for a lunch with another set of relatives who had come from USA. So it had been a couple of weeks of functions and meetups. I was completely happy and satisfied with us making this trip to Chandigarh and spending some good quality time with family .

But Sunday evening, after meeting our cousins, I suddenly started feeling feverish and had terrible body aches. I tried resting but my teething baby needed me more, so I wasn’t able to rest as much. By night I was very sure I had fever, checked and it was 101.5 . I kind of knew because I never felt this weak and tired and had this type of body aches. A dose of Dolo helped me and I felt completely fine in a couple of hours and slept well.

The next morning, waking up besides my sweet daughter , I was admiring her innocent sleeping face , when I suddenly saw some red marks on my arm. Rushed to the washroom and saw quite a lot of red marks on my face and chest. I got completely scared. Hadn’t seen something like this before . Started guessing what was causing it , was it the food , was it the heat , what was it ? I didn’t want to waste much time , after all it was my brother’s wedding in 6 days. So we rushed to the doctor and he immediately said what I thought I was never expecting to hear. I had after all these years contracted chicken pox. How I wished that little girl in school should had gotten it back then so I didn’t have to go through this now. Doctor said no to travelling for marriage and no to travelling back to Bangalore for atleast 2 weeks.

I was devastated. I didn’t want to miss my little brother’s wedding. He is a special kid . He has gone through so much in his life. He has finally found his soulmate and is happy. And I so wanted to be with him, cheering for him , love him and support him on his special day. And I would be missing all of this. Damn you virus. And the next thing I was scared about was my daughter. She had been feeding till morning. I was so scared that she might be exposed to the virus as well. I immediately called up her doctor and asked my husband to get her booster dose for the chicken pox done.

So yes, after making up my mind that nothing could be done , I accepted that this is karma. This is something I am supposed to go through. But I had no clue what I should be expecting except some hints that my mother gave from when she got the pox. I knew I was going to get rashes that are going to be filled with liquid, that it is going to be itchy , that I wasn’t supposed to itch , that it might leave scars on my body , that it might even take a month for everything to feel normal. And suddenly I started understanding the severity of this disease. I started following my doctor’s prescription and like a diligent student , took care of my diet , hygiene , medications properly. This was the easy part. The difficult part was not touching my daughter, not hugging her , not kissing her , not feeding her. She still breastfeeds to sleep. How was she even going to sleep at night.

Female body is so amazing, I realized it while I was pregnant. I realized it when I saw my daughter on the ultrasound machine for the first time. It was unbelievable. I was actually growing life inside my body. All the hormones, all the organs, all the surroundings did their job so amazingly to give birth to my sweet little daughter. I have been extremely lucky as she has got the best of me and my husband. ?She has been breastfed since birth , although that is now limited to night time feeds, that has been her zone of comfort and security. She is 20 months now , and lately I was feeling to completely wean her off. I didn’t know how , I wasn’t able to say no to her , I always ended up comforting her whenever she needed me. So weaning her off was just not happening. Chicken pox made that forceful transition for us. Not just feeding , I couldn’t even hug or kiss my daughter. The first few days she cried tirelessly at night searching for me. I couldn’t bear how sad she was. But ultimately she did sleep and she did sleep without me. Unbelievable was happening. She was actually getting weaned off. Something I wouldn’t have been able to do otherwise. Thanks to this virus , it was happening. However this meant end of my breastfeeding journey. Something that my hormones have been working on since the first ultrasound, I was ending it. It wasn’t easy for my body to accept that. Weaning off comes with its own challenges for the mothers that doesn’t get talked about so openly. Along with pain of chicken pox , there came another pain of this ending journey . The engorgement, the heaviness , the continuous leakage ( sorry for tmi ) . But I knew this was supposed to happen one day , so I let it happen . I let these changes happen to my body while it was fighting the virus. Day 3 , my daughter slept on her own , a dream I had since she was born. And I knew I would be alright as well.

#ChickenPox #HealthyBody #MentalHealth #maternityleave