Shingles, (Thirteen Ways cont'd.)

5.

Here’s the story on how you get shingles. And how you don’t. You don’t catch it from someone who has shingles, even if the blisters are as described above in #1. What you can catch then is chicken pox, if you’ve never had them (Kemper 137). That should also make it clear that you can’t get shingles unless you’ve already had chicken pox.

I had chicken pox when I was about four years old, one pock, actually, and I used to brag about it because I didn’t know then what I learned when I got shingles: that the chicken pox virus (herpes) stays in your body ever after, lying dormant somewhere in the spine, and if and when it is reactivated, you get shingles somewhere on one side of your body—that side corresponding to the place in your spine where the herpes virus slept. (It’s a nervous system thing.) And obviously it doesn’t matter if you had one pock or a hundred of them.

Here’s where the zoster part comes in. You get shingles in a certain zone, the pain and sores forming a belt-like pattern around the waste, for instance, but not all the way around. By the way, I have heard it said that if you ever got shingles on both sides of your body at once, you would die. But I don’t know if that’s truth or folklore.

My Healthwise Handbook says that no one knows how the chicken pox virus becomes activated again (Kemper 137), but I don’t believe that. The handbook continues, “Shingles is more common in older adults [I resent that remark] and people who have weakened immune systems [stress can weaken the immune system, right?], but can affect anyone who has had chicken pox [that we already knew]” (137).

6.

Now, about where you really get shingles. I sat in the living room of a family whose three-year-old boy had full-blown raging chicken pox. In fact, the couch I sat on was wet and smelled of urine, probably his. We’ll not go into how I could have sat in urine and just stayed there sitting in it. That’s probably a different story.

Within two weeks I had shingles. I had no doubt where I got shingles or, I should say, how. But most medical professionals you speak to these days will say—and most I spoke to did say—“Oh no. That’s not the way it happens.” Other people told me that, too. In fact, I heard, “Oh no. That’s not the way it happens” so much that I actually gave in and said, “Okay, they’re probably right.”

Then one medical professional said, when I told him I had had shingles—and he’s been a doctor for a long time—“Who were you with who had chicken pox? And, by the way, don’t go over to Caldwell on Spring Break. It’s a full-scale chicken pox epidemic over there every year. Easy to pick up shingles.” Hallelujah! I was right.