Your Guide to Chickenpox (Adults Get It, too)

We all know what chickenpox is. When your body is covered with red spots that are itchy. It is considered a children’s disease, so it’s said that getting it as an adult is more difficult. To me, I was also embarrassed when I finally caught it about a week ago. Because mostly kids get it and it’s rare to hear when an adult gets it. People usually turn those into stories. At first I wasn’t even sure if I wanted to let anyone know about it 😀 but I was like, “Get over it, Dlvan.”

For years I wanted to get it because whenever I heard that someone else got it, I would freak out and think is it gonna be the time I’ll get it. I’d been around many people who got it over the years – my sister, my best friend, and my students – but for some weird reason I never caught it, so I thought maybe I had some sort of natural immunity against it. I don’t even know if that’s a thing 😀 I never checked it out.

Anyways, I had always thought that getting chickenpox was getting blisters and them being itchy, with maybe a little fever. But jokes on me, that was not the case. It was waaaaay worse. Like way way worse. I’ll tell my story just to point out how much I’d underestimated dear chickenpox. It’s not to scare anyone or anything, just a little guidance. And of course each person’s body works differently, so what happened to me may not happen to you, and you may be experiencing other things.

After a lot of my students were infected with it, I finally caught it. At first, I just felt tired and I just wanted to lay down and not interact with anyone. I thought that I was tired because of work, but it lasted for another day and I decided to go to the hospital but before I went I saw the red spots and I was both “Oh shit;” and “Yay I’ll get it over with.” But my reaction for that week has been the oh shit one 😀. 

And as soon as I realized I got chickenpox, my brain opened the questions chamber and for the answers, I ran to Google. (Who else do we run to for answers?!) One of the first search results made me think, “Okay, cool.. cool.. cool.. cool..” I screenshotted the search result and here I’ve uploaded the picture for you to see.

So it was not just having red spots and itches. It was more than that. Going back a little backward and to the symptoms, after I started feeling tired, I noticed that I had a fever, and then I stopped feeling hungry and I didn’t know why I disliked food. That is a very weird thing for me since I love foooood. Then my body started to ache everywhere. I was like what’s going on, until I saw the red spots, which explained a lot. Then more fatigue, more losing energy, a little nausea, more losing appetite, which made me more tired, sleeping was like hell, and not to mention being covered with these red dots. For some reason, among all these, my throat was in pain, I thought I had a sore throat but it turned out that it’s normal to feel this when having chickenpox. 

It also reminded me of that episode from Tom and Jerry where they get chickenpox and I related to it. So yeah, chickenpox is much more than I’d ever expected. It was like a slap in the face, metaphorically of course. But at least I got it and you can’t get it more than once. For those who haven’t caught it yet, good luck.