A few days have now gone by and I hope your throat is feeling better. If not, let your doctor know and, in the meantime, I encourage you to post on our Ear, Nose and Throat community .
I am sorry you are having a problem after your surgery. Although it is a "minor" surgery, it is normal for patients to feel uncomfortable a week after an extraction and you had four.
I know it seems like your sore throat and your extractions are related - because they are happening in the same part of your body - but a sore throat may simply be a sore throat.
While it is possible that your sore throat is viral in origin it is virtually impossible for it to be shingles. Shingles also known as herpes zoster is a secondary reactivation of the chicken pox virus (varicella zoster).
Shingles is always unilateral in presentation. The chicken pox virus will "sleep" in your spinal cord (forever) once you have had chicken pox and you cannot have shingles if you never had chicken pox.
After you have gotten over chicken pox the virus that caused it will 'sleep' in your spinal cord for the rest of your life. When the virus 'wakes up' (activated) the virus will either affect only the right OR left side of one nerve branch which corresponds to how the nerves come out of the spinal cord.
Clinically shingles affects one peripheral sensory nerve or a branch of one nerve, tends to be extremely painful and develops chicken pox like blisters in the skin and mucous membrane along the branch of the affected nerve.
Patients with shingles affecting multiple sites and both the right and left sides are almost always immune compromised, HIV, AIDS, uncontrolled diabetic etc.
So the likelihood of your sore throat being caused by shingles is almost impossible, the virus simply does not present that way.
Hopefully you will be feeling better by now and this is an academic response to a resolved clinical question.
Dr. Gwen Cohen Brown
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