Shingles: The Facts

When we were kids, almost all of us had that annoying thing called the chicken pox. It wasn't fun, you got yelled at for scratching the chicken pox... and you didn't even touch a chicken so being a kid you have no clue how you got it... but the good thing was; you got to stay home from school. Here you are, decades later and you develop shingles; many people call it the adult version of the chicken pox... and you still haven't touched a chicken!

This is what happened to my grandmother a week before Thanksgiving this year. She's 82 years old, and one look at the contaminated area and it didn't look anything like chicken pox. But she was very weak, even disoriented and stated that it was very painful. So I decided to look into this... and here are the facts that everyone should know.

When you're a kid and get that dang chicken pox, it never goes away. It's a virus called varicella zoster and it actually sits quietly inactive in the nerve cells next to your spinal chord just waiting to erupt again. In most cases, it takes decades for it to do so.

If you remember chicken pox, it was everywhere on your body; and the more you scratched and touched other places on your body, the more it spread. Shingles is a bit different. Shingles actually occurs in an infections mob on one side of the body. In my Grams case, it attacked her hand and arm all the way up to her elbow and stopped. The rest of her body was fine.

If you have ever had chicken pox, you can get shingles, however, if you never had chicken pox as a child or if you have already gotten the vaccine for chicken pox, you can't get shingles, but you can get chicken pox. I've had chicken pox, but my boyfriend never had it. So we were a little afraid to go over there for the holiday. But we did find out that the virus can only be transmitted if you in contact with the fluid that develops in and around the blisters of the shingles. You can not be infected by the infected person coughing or breathing on you. Talk about a sigh of relief for having a delicious turkey dinner.