Father’s Day 2019 I woke up before my church alarm to an unexpected gift. Excruciating pain in my left eye. This was a pain I had never felt before and my nurse wife couldn’t understand it. Instead of going to the early “old people service” I spent the next few hours in Urgent Care. When I finally saw a doctor, I had zero faith I would get help because the guy who walked in was the same guy who misdiagnosed me years earlier and almost sent me to a specialist for no good reason. I’m not holding a grudge, I understand why he jumped to conclusions then, but when he couldn’t figure out why my eye was trying to kill me, he drained all my remaining faith in medicine.
What neither of us knew on that day became much more clear in about 48 hours when my head became covered in ridiculously disgusting sores. My eye doctor, who I have complete faith in, correctly diagnosed me with Shingles. He called it a really bad case, perhaps the worst he’s ever seen.
Shingles is supposed to be an old people sickness. Grandparents get Shingles, not 47 year old guys who are very healthy. I’m sure my eye doctor or my wife explained it during one of the long car rides to and from doctors during the next few weeks when I couldn’t drive because my eye was swollen completely shut. Something about the virus that causes Chicken Pox decides to hang out in your body forever and any day it gets pissed off, it chooses a major nerve and completely wrecks it. On the surface it appears as nasty boils or sores. Underneath the virus takes a jackhammer to your nerve causing intense pain and permanent damage in really bad cases.
If you look at the diagram below, you’ll see one of the areas the virus likes to attack is on the top left of the person’s head (his left). That’s exactly where it got me and that’s exactly what the boundary looked like. Actual straight lines dividing the infected part from the uninfected part. It was crazy.
If you’re nice, you’ll never have to worry about seeing any photos of me during this time. They’re hideous. Aside from looking like an actual monster, the pain was nearly unbearable. I remember thinking that this must be what it feels like to have long needles jabbed directly into your eye sockets. No pain medication even touched it in terms of helping. One of the medications prescribed woke me up in the middle of the night screaming in pain feeling like someone was ripping my eye out of my head.
In addition to the pain, I also felt like I had a terrible sickness. I was achy and my joints hurt. I was constantly tired. It was a mess. I was a mess.
My kids had never seen me incapacitated like this. One morning I got up and did my run with one eye open and collapsed on the bed after a shower. That was all the activity I could muster. I apparently dozed off and I woke to hear my son asking if I was still alive. After a few weeks, the sores healed and I looked a little more normal. After a couple of more weeks I could wear contacts again and resume some regular daily activities. The eye pain continued for months. The nerve pain continues today.
People kept saying that I was too young to have Shingles. At 47, I was too young to even get vaccinated against it. Shingles didn’t care how old I was. It was very mean to me. The aftermath of it left me with discolored skin or scars on my head that are still visible. It also left me with either long term or permanent nerve damage to that area of my head. I guess we’ll all find out which it is in a few more years. Every single day I have phantom pains that range from irritating to really painful. I was very lucky to not lose any vision in my eye. I knew this was not something I wanted to go through again so I started looking at options for a vaccination.
I don’t care what you think about vaccines. I, for one, am glad my mom dragged me to the pediatrician’s office to be vaccinated against some bad childhood and adulthood sicknesses. At the same time, I know that some of the rare side effects of vaccines can be worse than those sicknesses. I may even share your suspicion of “big pharma” or whatever people call it. Anytime drugs are advertised on TV, we should all be able to see that as a very concerning problem. Even with the whole fiasco of vaccines during 2020, I get that we all probably have feelings one way or another about vaccines. Let me reiterate, I don’t care. I would take a chance to never have the experience of Shingles again. And I promise you that if you had seen me during that time or, Heaven forbid, you ever had Shingles, you would also be looking for a vaccine.
If you don’t know me well, this is where I have to tell you I don’t really go to doctors. The reason I was in Urgent Care on that bad cruel Father’s Day is that I didn’t have a doctor of my own to call. I wouldn’t say that I’m “scared” of doctors, but I do not enjoy going to them. When I had to find one to do follow-up visits after the whole Shingles incident, I allowed them to do the blood tests and all the things they wanted just to prove I was fine, but I haven’t been back. That doctor, who I liked a lot, told me they could get me a Shingles vaccine despite my age but they recommended I wait a few months to allow all of that bad stuff to get out of my system. I was happy to wait.
That wait flipped the calendar over into the chaos of 2020 and I still wanted the vaccine, but no one was really talking about Shingles at that time. It was even kind of difficult to go to a real doctor’s office, so I happily waited. That wait flipped the calendar over into the recovery of 2021 and everyone was talking about vaccines, just not the Shingles vaccine. I wanted to travel and I knew that I would need to get the Pandemic Pokes in order to be allowed to enter other countries, so that rose to the top of my list of priorities.
Add in a little procrastination and a whole lot of being really busy and it brings us to this week, sitting in a chair at my local pharmacy, waiting on the first dose of the Shingles vaccine. I decided there wasn’t really a good day to do it so I just did it. I had heard most everyone say that I would need to do it at a time when I had a couple of days to recover in bed. The vaccine has a reputation for causing splitting headaches, arm pain and flu-like symptoms. Never in my life have I found a good time to plan to be sick, so I filled out the form and sat in the chair. The pharmacist was very nice and she even apologized when I flinched. Luck for all of us, Blue was there with his phone at the ready to capture this moment.
My plan was to not change my plans. My arm was sore as it would be with most any shot but that didn’t really affect any of my afternoon or evening plans. I took some ibuprofen before bed but I always forget that I like to sleep on my left side so that was a bit of a challenge with the soreness. I woke up feeling fine and went out for my regular 5k run which also felt great. When I stopped running, I could feel the achiness in my muscles and joints. Coffee didn’t quite fix it but I stayed active and the longer I was up and the more ibuprofen I took, the better I felt. 24 hours later and ibuprofen free, I was as back to normal as I get.
So this is your Public Service Announcement or your After School Special, because if you’re old enough to remember an After School Special, you’re probably old enough to get Shingles. I don’t know the odds of you getting Shingles but I’m certain you don’t want them. Especially Ocular Shingles. And since you don’t get to choose where the virus will attack, it’s probably a good idea for you to look into the vaccine. Whether or not you choose to get it is your business. My job is simply to provide my cautionary tale so you can make a well-informed decision.
(Not actually an old person yet? Then you probably know how to set a reminder for your 50th birthday. “Hey Siri, set a reminder to get a Shingles shot on my 50th birthday”.)
*if you'd like a more detailed description of my suffering from 2019, type "shingles" into the search bar on the desktop version of this blog
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