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?
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).
