My girlfriend who is thirty four has Herpes Zoster. She started feeling a tingle/ superficial pain on her left abdomen on Saturday night and now she has about eight papules in the area. Her Dr. prescribed an antiviral, a narcotic, and a systemic steroid. I also had Chicken Pox as a child. Is this contagious? Isn’t she young to get shingles? She said that she has been under a great deal of stress with school would that cause this?
Yes, you can get shingles as a young person; I had a series of outbreaks while I was in my early twenties, triggered by stress/exhaustion - my symptoms were not particularly severe, but the spots came out in perfect horizontal rings right around my body and arms; I think this is because the Chicken Pox virus takes refuge in the nervous system and my personal hypothesis is that these rings corresponded to sections of the spinal cord; each attack came back a bit lower down my body than the previous one and eventually there was nowhere left for them to go - they stopped; I have experienced a couple of minor outbreaks since then, but that manifest just as mild flu-like symptoms, followed by small, random patches of spots.
My sympathies to your girlfriend; my dad had shingles and they suck. He was in dreadful pain for at least six months. Stress is a very common catalyst. My grandmother had it in her eye.
My husband also developed shingles in his mid-thirties, following a very stressful period at work. Apparently, if it occurs in a young-to-middle-aged adult with no immune system problems, stress usually gets the blame.
At the time we had a toddler who hadn’t yet had chicken pox, so we were concerned about him picking up the virus from his daddy’s sores. The doctor told us that shingles do shed virus but not nearly as much as chicken pox sores. He suggested that my husband keep his shirt on (his outbreak was on the chest) when playing with our son, and wash his hands well after treating or washing the sores. The doctor didn’t seem concerned about spreading shingles to me. Nobody else got sick.
Good luck to your girlfriend. Shingles is a miserable disease.
You can get it pretty young. My friend just got hit, and he’s 21.
Really does suck, though.
I got shingles when I was six (after a mild bout with chicken pox as an infant and a worse one when I was three).
I had no idea there was an ‘age’ when you get shingles.
No, you can’t catch shingles. If you’ve had chicken pox, you already have the virus living in your nervous system. Shingles is just the expression of that virus. I think it affects one nerve at a time, travelling in the axon, but I won’t vouch for it as I just listened to that lecture this morning and haven’t gone over my notes yet.