Once you have contracted the chickenpox virus, it cannot be eradicated. If you had chickenpox as a child, the virus will continue to secretly lurk in the nerve cells of your body for many years. If the chickenpox was mild as a child, you may not even remember that you had chickenpox. But when the chickenpox virus (known as the herpes zoster virus) reappears in adulthood, it becomes shingles. The name comes from the Latin and French word for “belt” or “girdle,” because of the similarity of the way the blisters wrap around the torso. No one knows why the virus suddenly flares up again. Some doctors believe it is due to a temporary weakening of the immune system. Shingles is common in people over the age of 50, and the immune response is usually weakened in older people. Injury or stress may also be a cause. In addition, people who are immunosuppressed are more likely to develop shingles, such as people who have had organ transplants, cancer patients or people with AIDS. Symptoms of shingles begin as a painful or tingling sensation. Then a red rash appears, followed quickly by blisters. The blisters may appear anywhere and last from five days to four weeks, then crust over and disappear. An important characteristic of shingles is that the blistering rash appears on only one side of the body, most often on the trunk, buttocks or face. The real pain of shingles comes after the blisters have healed: the medical term for this is post-herpetic neuralgia, a sharp, shooting and stabbing pain that lasts for years after the blisters have healed at the site of the attack. The older you are, the more likely you are to suffer from this chronic pain. Fortunately, only about 10% of all shingles patients will experience this sequelae. Rapid treatment can reduce the chances of suffering from long-term pain after battling shingles. (The only consolation is that most people only get shingles once.)