How would it feel to have Shingles?

Let me set the scene.

It's two days before your 40th birthday. You are just getting to work, excited because you have weekend plans to fly to another state and celebrate your big 4-0 with friends! A good friend already flew there. Your flights are booked (with upgraded seats). The Airbnb is booked. Rollerskating and other fun activities are planned. But something is wrong. A strange pain in your ribs. It started this morning and felt like you had a sunburn that had been scratched. You looked in the mirror to check for a bug bite or scratch, but there was nothing. When you got to work an hour later, you walked straight to the bathroom, because it felt worse and worse and there you see it. Two blotchy spots of a rash.

And this was my exact experience on July 19th. I made a doctor's appointment for 2:30pm and opened an incognito window to Google "Shingles". It sure seemed like it might be shingles but I was holding out hope that it was nothing serious and I could still go to Seattle.

From the time I got to work to the Dr's appointment, the skin on my ribs hurt more and more. I could not find a comfortable position to sit in that didn't irritate the skin. I will explain the sensation more later.

I explained to the doctor what I was feeling and that I thought it might be shingles. Before she looked at it, she winced with a face full of sympathy and said, "Yeah, it's probably shingles." And it was. She asked when I noticed the rash, because if you treat it with anti-viral medication in the first couple of days, you might be able to reduce the duration. Typical duration is 3-5 WEEKS! I was able to tell her that I actually looked this morning, saw nothing, and looked again around 10am and saw the rash. I took my first dose within 8 hours of identifying it. More on the anti-virals later. Spoiler Alert: they suck.

Let me test something out in the spirit of my "How would it feel" experiment. I have these questions in mind.

• Before: What did I think it would feel like?
• Before: What did I think I would get out of it?
• During: What did it actually feel like?
• During: What surprised me?
• After: What did I get out of it that I was/wasn't expecting?

Beforehand, I did not know what the shingles were. I felt like it was something for the elderly and was in the butt area. (Just being real folks). I never thought about shingles in my life. I never expected to get them and never heard of anyone having them.

During: What surprised me was how uncomfortable shingles are, which leads me to what did it actually feel like. With that, I want to address physical and emotional feelings.

Let's start with the Mayo Clinic's Explanation of Shingles. Any quote in this blog comes from this website.

Let me answer you the two questions EVERYONE asked me. How did you get it and is it contagious?

The shingles virus is the same as the chickenpox virus. "After you've had the chickenpox, the virus lies inactive in nerve tissue near your spinal cord and brain. Years later, the virus may reactivate as shingles." If you have shingles, you can give the chickenpox to someone who has never had it. It is recommended that you stay away from little kids, pregnant women or adults who have never had chickenpox. You cannot spread shingles. Therefore, you cannot catch shingles. It just pops up one day like an unexpected, uninvited, unwelcome, down right rude house guest. And the house is your body.

The physical sensation is nearly indescribable and I think that's why every damned website out there has this sentence, "Shingles is a viral infection that causes a painful rash." I don't know about you, but "painful rash" to me elicits zero, nothing, no ideas. I don't know what a painful rash would be. I've had itchy rashes. That's what rashes do, right?

But it's not the shingles rash that was the problem for me. It's the fact that this is nerve related. Your skin hurts. Because it is nerve related, the pain radiates away from the source (the rash or nerves near the rash). The best analogy I could come up with: It is like a painful purple sunburn. There is no way to sit comfortably and if anything touches it, even air, the nerves light up like little tiny electric waves of discomfort. At times, it feels like you're being poked/stabbed with electrified needles one at a time. Sometimes, it feels like you're having chills, but instead of it being chills of cold air, it's chills of pain over the rash.

When I saw the doctor, she warned me that the rash would spread from my two little spots and boy was she right. Within 3 days, the rash spread across my ribs on the right side of my body and around the back to my spine. The rash band was about 3 inches wide. I also told her that my pain intensity, on a scale of 0 (no pain) to 10 (hospital pain), was a 3 or 4. This would increase to a 7 or 8 within days.

When I got home that night, a Thursday, I knew this was going to be bad. I cancelled my trip to Seattle and ended up spending my shingle-y birthday at my friend's house (who flew back from Seattle early to host my sad birthday). I ended up curled up in a ball most of the time and eventually just took a nap in her spare room before going home. I did have macrons though, which were delicious (Thanks Krista!).

Now I will explain my decline.

I started taking the anti-viral pills as soon as I could. Three pills a day for ten days. But these were the biggest pills I'd ever seen, no exaggeration. I knew I'd never be able to swallow them whole. I have a hard enough time with things like Advil. The first night, I cut the pills into quarters and swallowed them down. The next day, at some point one of the pieces was maybe too big or too sticky, but got caught in my throat. My throat seized on it and I bent over to try to cough it out, but had no air, so I sort of puked it up. There was no vomit, it wasn't a puke from my stomach, but just my throat pushed that little pill out into the sink. And because I knew I needed to get that pill inside me for fear of having shingles longer, I popped that sucker back in my mouth and choked it down. But this started a psychological spiral. I believed I couldn't swallow these pills and soon enough I really couldn't. I had a few more episodes of choking on very small portions of the pill before I decided to crush them and eat them in applesauce, which was bitter and disgusting. I ended up, over the next 9 or 10 days, figuring out a ritual/formula that worked for me. Crush, crush, crush, applesauce WITH JAM, eat it as fast as possible, don't chew and done!

I was determined to take all of these pills, but I found out soon enough that I was having a bad side effect. The anti-viral pills were activating the nerve pain and spreading it from my hips to mid-chest and down my arms to my wrists. At it's worst, I couldn't move without agony and just shut my eyes, covered up with a blanket and tried to sleep it off.

Through all of this, Advil helped. And thank God, my brain believed that I could swallow Advil. And I could.

So, the pain was bad, but worse than that the pain was constant. (I'm nearly three weeks in as I write this and am still uncomfortable - level 2 or 3 pain at most.) The constant pain, even if wavering between a level 3 to a level 8 to a level 4 was exhausting and drove me up the wall. Having no relief was unbearable. I could not calm my mind about it. All I thought about was how uncomfortable I was and how I could not find a good position to sit or lay. I could not swallow pills. I felt like this would go on forever. I spun out and became sad, anxious, more anxious and more anxious.

When I was at my original Dr's appointment, I asked her, "Do you have anything for the stress?" Let me say that I do NOT like taking pills. I do not want to need anti-anxiety meds and am by no means a pill seeker, but my stress level was at a new high this year. It felt like a prolonged stress too. I had a bad, bad flu first thing in January, visited my folks in April, then I had my wedding and honeymoon in June, a weekend trip to Cleveland to visit 40 relatives, and my 40th birthday in July. Even if it was "good stress" like traveling or a wedding, it still stresses the body. The Doc gave me Lorazepam, which took the edge off during those particularly terrible days. (CBD Oil also helped *legal in CA)

Getting back to my question: What surprised me? The whole thing! I didn't expect to get shingles. I didn't expect the type of pain or the duration. But it's not over yet. I went for a follow up appointment on Monday (yesterday) and my doc said I have about another 10 days of this before I'm back to myself.

I think it's still too "during" to talk about the "after" of this horrible experiment, so stay tuned.

And if this was boring or gross, just wait. The subjects of these posts will change (and be more positive).

This is 40: My Year of Experiments

Hi everybody. I know this was a travel blog for my major trips, but I'm thinking about doing an experiment. Or rather, a year worth of experiments.

When I was in my 20s, a friend of mine did a project for herself where she took a picture of her bed every morning for a year. I did 365 days of happiness (more on this later).

It feels like ages since I've had a year-long project.

Now that I am 40 (hopefully twice as good as my 20th year), I am thinking about doing a year's worth of experiments with the premise “What would it feel like if…?”. The thought being that, for a year, I would run experiments for different lengths of time (weekly, monthly, etc) testing things out to see how it feels. Here are some examples of what I’m thinking.

What would it feel like if I used lotion for a month
What would it feel like if I had shingles for a month (THIS experiment happened without my provocation)
What would it feel like if I took Gabapentin for two weeks?
What would it feel like if I took an antiviral for 10 days?
What would it feel like if I walked to BART rather than drove to BART for a month?
What would it feel like if I cut out processed foods for a month?
What would it feel like if I did push-ups every night before bed for a month?
What would It feel like if I made a personal phone call every day for a month?
What would it feel like if I sent a postcard every day for a month?
What would it feel like if I meditated for 20 minutes everyday for a month?
What would it feel like if I flossed everyday for a month?
What would it feel like if I focused on looking up or looking down?
What would it feel like to watch a Khan Academy video everyday?

My idea is to ask a question and document it. Say what I feel beforehand, what I expect to feel during, and what I feel afterwards. What are the changes I noticed? What are the changes I expected but didn’t notice? Do I want to continue something to extend the duration of x benefit?

Just by thinking "how would it feel", I’m already noticing a change. I've had to open my mind to come up with "experiments" that I don’t already do now, that I’d be willing to try, that I believe will have positive outcomes.

This reminds me of the 100 Days of Happiness phenomenon. I was feeling down in the dumps and decided to post one good thing a day on Facebook for 100 days. I thought it would be nice to find at least something good everyday. What I didn't expect is that by looking for something good everyday, I ended up looking for something good ALL THE TIME. And even after I posted a good thing, I'd keep looking for an even better thing. When the 100 days were up, I decided to extend it to a full year because my overall happiness had increased tremendously since day one and I didn't want it to stop.

Side note: Bad things happened during those 365 days. A good friend passed away. My grandmother passed away. Coming up with something happy on those days was hard, but HAVING to find something good those days was mood altering. Instead of wallowing in sadness, looking for only sad things, I had to (if only for a few minutes) broaden my mind and look for something good. "I had a root beer today" was one of those posts. It didn't turn my whole day around, but it might have stopped the slippery slope into depression. Knowing that I could find happiness in very dark times was and continues to be valuable.

Coming back to the year-long experiment...I feel like even the act of thinking up experiments has opened my mind. It makes me think how many things can I do that are new and how many experiences I was going to have anyway would be enhanced by asking the question "How would this make me feel" or "what can I gain from this?"

Krista and I booked tickets to travel to Yellowstone and now I’m asking the question "How would it feel to camp for five days?" I know when I camped for two days my level of cleanliness decreased, because you just get used to being dirty. I know that my mind slowed down, because I didn't need to do something every five minutes. What else will I learn?

If nothing else, this mindset is the experiment. How aware can I be this year? What can I learn from being so aware and from trying new things? What will surprise me?

I'm open to it. I'm up for it.

If you are too, feel free to follow along.