Thursday, October 19, 2006

Worse Than "The Plague"

Today I am going to discuss something those who have been lucky enough to be on the receiving end of my many e-mails or who have followed along in my blog since its beginning, have heard me make mention about on numberous occasions.

It's called "SHINGLES!" And trust me when I tell you this, I think it has to be the very worst disease or condition or whatever the hell it is considered to be in the medical annals!

I'm not going to go into the details about how it gets its name - you can look it up in any medical dictionary or medical website too for that matter. But it is a royal pain!

Mine started on August 26th, the morning after I had had a colonoscopy but I don't think the two are related in any way, shape or form. It think it was just my time to get hit with this really nasty problem to add to the others already in my life.

It began with a sharp, stabbing pain that went from the right to left side of my back, slightly below the shoulder blade and was strong enough that it woke me up! Now, that's a sharp pain if I happen to be in a really deep sleep.

It took me several hours that day to somewhat shake off the discomfort of this pain thing as it felt like I had some type of new arthritic condition developing in my shoulder area.

The next two days, I was treated to the same wake-up call. Then on Monday nite, I started to notice a cluster of tiny bumps, kind of like little pimples, in the middle of my back, just above the waist. I asked my daughter to look at it and she said it looked like a little rash of tiny blisters.

Over the next two days after that, the rash grew until it went across the right half of my back, into the front midriff area and covered from the bottom of my bra to my waistband. And it started to itch and hurt, simultaneously.

I'd never had shingles before but kind of thought maybe that was what this was that had descended on me but for clarification of my suspicions, I checked out a couple of medical websites. I figured it was probably either shingles or maybe impetigo. But, since my grandson (who was then 4 months old) didn't have any little blistery things on him, I figured I was right in my original assumption of shingles.

That Friday, I went to the doctor and they gave me a prescription for some type of antibiotic and a pain pill (Lortab) and although the doctor said it would be slow to heal, the antibiotic would work - eventually.

Yeah, it did. After about 2-3 weeks, the lesions had finally begun to dry up and only a few in the middle area of my back were still a bit on the itchy side. But the Lortabs barely touched the problem of the pain that was really terrible then and is still lingering on and on and ON!

Granted, the affected area is slowly shrinking - and again, I do mean VERY SLOWLY too! Maybe in a couple years at the snails pace it is going, my midriff will be an area not completely aggravating the living daylights out of me.

But, at any rate, I have decided that if some scientist can come up with a cure for shingles, at the very least, something that will ease the pain, that person should definitely get the Nobel Prize for Medicine!

My vote would go there - if I had one in that respect!

Time to go take another lortab now.

No comments: