Is adult chicken pox as bad as they say?
I got chicken pox as a kid. I had quarter-sized lesions on the outside and inside of my body. It was awful. My aunt (just a few years older) got it and nearly died. Moreover, if he gets it, he won’t be in a position to take care of his kids and it could be deadly. He should wait out the incubation period and get vaccinated, so that this doesn’t happen again. (I hope his kids were vaccinated at 12 months.) And, if he does get it, he could end up being responsible for spreading it to pregnant women or children under a year (ie too young to vaccinate) when it’s still incubating and he doesn’t know he has it. So better to avoid it.
Having played nurse to someone who got chicken pox in her mid-twenties, he needs to avoid it like the plague….. cuz it IS a plague! She was in complete misery and almost had to go to the hospital. She couldn’t get out of bed for a week for more than going to the bathroom and even that required assistance. Adults have a hard time bouncing back from chicken pox and are often left with permanent damage like vision loss and even sterilization.
I had the pox when i was in my mid-20s. It was the absolute sickest I’ve ever been. Tell him to stay away from the kids at all costs. @greta – a chicken pox party is when one kid gets the pox and some parents get together and send their kids over the the pox kid’s house to play to deliberately expose their children so they will just get it when they are a kid and get it overwith.
I got it at age 24 in my last year of college (don’t ask). IIRC, the experience wasn’t so bad, but I was underemployed and could afford to take the 2 weeks off to recover. Didn’t have any scarring and the itching wasn’t that bad. Impressive level of breakout on my chest and back though. The shingles thing is the main reason to avoid it. The virus burrows deep and will come back eventually, in a mechanism that science doesn’t understand yet.
If you are willing to take wikipedia’s weigh in, “A person with chickenpox is contagious from one to five days before the rash appears until all blisters have formed scabs. This may take 5 to 10 days.[1] It takes from 10 to 20 days after contact with an infected person for someone to develop chickenpox” – so, if they were taken to the chicken pox infected party within the past five days, they should be golden for the weekend. Not even contagious! Have him grab a calculator and a calendar and figure out their possible contagious-days. Also, as mentioned before, most kids now-a-days are vaccinated for chicken pox, so they might not even *get* chicken pox. I was never vaccinated and carried to many chicken pox parties by my mother and I reached the ripe age of 25 without nary a pox. He might have the same luck as me? Natural immunity, baby!
