winterswanderlust replied to your post “theomnipotentfox replied to your post “After living for more than…”

I thought once someone had chicken pox they couldn’t get it again?

You can’t get chicken pox. What happens is if you have already had chicken pox and it lies dormant in your body for, say, a decade or several decades (the minimum observed is apparently a decade but usually you get it when you are a kid and then you get it in your 50s and older) and then a few things could happen that will give you shingles.

One of those things is running into an infectious person that infects you which reanimates the disease in your body to showcase the amazingly painful shingles rash (that can then come and go whenever it damn well wants apparently?).

Another of those things is that you become immunocompromised and it rears its ugly head as shingles. Again, it’s a random flare up kind of deal.

Another terrifying part of it (which could be because you don’t always know when people are infected with chicken pox that this one’s a thing), it just reanimates itself after a few decades and decides shingles is the thing it wants to be.

There’s a reason they have a shingles vaccine, because doing that when you are above a certain age (I think it’s 50 or 60?) will reduce the risk of your chicken pox waking up and remembering that it was supposed to kill you or at least damage you in some way. The rashes are horrible, if they happen around your eyes, you can lose your eyesight.

My mom had chicken pox when she was a kid and has just recently gotten the first shingles vaccine (there’s a double vaccine and with her health history, the double vaccine makes more sense). I will be getting it as well but it’s for a specific age (and older) so I am still way too young to be getting it at this point.