The first time I ever remember hearing the word was when my husband said his boss would be out of the office for up to eight weeks, while he recovered from a bad case of the “shingles.” I nodded and said, “Oh … that is too bad.”

But I knew nothing about shingles at that time, nor did anyone around me. During the summer of 2003, I received the education of a lifetime.

Two little blisters appeared near my nose on the left side of my face. They stayed there, unchanged, for two days. I didn’t think much of it, other than cosmetically.

On day three I came home from a hike, sat down on the sofa and got a horrible shooting pain up my left shoulder into my neck. Nothing helped ease the pain. I figured it was just a stiff neck, so I applied some topical pain ointment, took two Tylenol and went to bed.

The next morning, I looked in the mirror and didn’t recognize myself. To my horror, the left side of my face was completely covered with small red blisters. My nose was the size of a golf ball and I had a burning, severe pain that was off the charts.

My husband took one look at me and off to the doctor we went. Shingles.

Not only is this one of the most excruciatingly painful diseases to experience, but new research this week from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine shows that the virus can also be deadly. Researchers found that elderly people with the disease were more than twice as likely to have a stroke in the first week of a shingles attack and nearly twice as likely to have a heart attack.

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The study looked at the medical records of more than 67,000 Medicare patients in the U.S. who had shingles and suffered either a stroke or heart attack within a year afterwards.

Who Gets Shingles?
One out of every three people will develop shingles over the course of their lifetime, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

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The most common age group affected is those in their 60s, 70s and older. Half of the American population has a high risk of getting shingles by their 80s. If you’ve had chickenpox, you’re fair game, no matter your age.

My husband’s boss and I were both in our early 40s.

“Periods of high stress, depression and prolonged fatigue may weaken the immune system in otherwise healthy young adults and lead to shingles. Chronic illnesses such as chronic kidney or lung disease, cancer, HIV/AIDS or other diseases that affect the immune system also may increase the risk of a shingles eruption, regardless of age,” Dr. James Watson, a neurologist at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, told LifeZette.

What Reactivates the Virus?
The extremely painful, localized skin rash is caused by the varicella zoster virus, basically, the same virus that causes chicken pox. When you get chicken pox or the immunization for chicken pox, you acquire the varicella zoster virus in your nervous system. There it stays forever.

Shingles typically erupt years later, possibly due to a weak immune system brought on by aging, a compromised immune system, or in my case, environmental factors, meaning stress. That’s what my doctor felt might have caused it. My husband and I had been working on a home remodel, and as life and work and family and busy schedules would have it, we weren’t seeing much of each other at that time. The stress of all of this, combined with an unusually cold rainy Colorado summer, had apparently taken its toll.

What are the Symptoms?
The first symptom(s) is usually pain, tingling, or burning that occurs on oneinfo-shingles side of the body before the rash surfaces. When the rash does appear, it usually breaks out in a narrow area. In my case, it was on one side of my face (including mouth, eyes, and ears).

The burning, inflamed red patches on the skin are typically followed by small blisters. Other symptoms may include, but are not limited to:

  • general ill feeling
  • headaches that don’t get better with normal dosage of pain killers
  • joint pain
  • swollen glands (lymph nodes)
  • difficulty moving some facial muscles
  • difficulty hearing (or loss)
  • taste and vision problems

Once diagnosed, your doctor will usually prescribe an antiviral drug. This helps reduce the pain, prevent complications and shorten the course of the disease. The key is that it has to be taken within the first 72 hours of that initial pain or burning and before blisters appear. Most of us, of course, will have no idea it is shingles until it’s too late for the drug.

As our society ages, better awareness of the virus and the newer class of drugs aimed at preventing and treating the disease is critical. The earlier it is caught, the less severe the symptoms.

The best defense is to talk with your physician about getting the shingles and chicken pox vaccines. The shingles vaccine is approved by the FDA for people age 50 and older. People who have had shingles can also receive the vaccine to help prevent future occurrences.