i’m not really sure why i stopped updating this. i sit here at my computer because it’s pretty much the only thing i can do right now until my pain meds kick in. somehow i managed to end up with shingles. yeah…that awful thing your grandma had last year? i, a healthy 26 year old woman, managed to end up with it, too! i’m still trying to figure out how i pissed off the universe so badly as to end up in this much pain. today has got to be the most painful day so far…it feels like my shingels have shingles. hot stuff, huh? incase you have no clue what the hell i’m talking about, shingles come from the same virus that causes chickenpox when you’re little. once you kick chickenpox’s ass as a child, the virus stays dormant in your central nervous system. that is, until your immune system decides to wuss out and then it attacks a nerve. mine started as SEVERE back pain just to the left of my spine, about bra-strap-high last sunday. i’d been sitting in the floor putting together a scrapbook in a desperate attempt to win a fella back. i spent about two hours sitting in the floor hunched over my little creation, so i thought perhaps my back was killing me from sitting in the floor instead of at the table. i wrote it off as yet one of the many things i can no longer do past the age of 25 (thong panties, check! working all day after an all-nighter, check! sitting in the floor with bad posture instead of sitting up at the table, check!). the pain lasted all night, there was nothing i could do to relieve it. monday came around and it was hurting even more! i spent the majority of my shift monday night conning my co-workers into rubbing my back. i slept layed on a heating pad all night only to be in even more pain on tuesday. i took a mild muscle relaxer…still no relief. got a wonderful massage….STILL no relief. i came home and took a stronger muscle relaxer and hell, i’ll admit it, i even washed it down with a beer…and STILL no relief. by this point the ache in my back was accompanied by this weird tingling/prickly feeling that went in a band around the left side of my torso…from the painful spot near my spine, all the way around my left boob. i wrote it off as just feeling funny from the muscle relaxers and attempted sleep. the next morning i woke up with painful red patches all along the area where i felt tingly the night before…a few of the red patches had tiny little blisters so i went to the doctor where i was told i had shingles. i’d barely even heard of shingles before, and what i had heard didn’t excite me much. the doc had no good news…it was going to get much worse before it gets better, the blisters could stick around for weeks and the pain could stick around for months. oh, and i should stay away from my best friend, who is pregnant, until this all clears up. oh joy! she loaded me up with anti-viral and pain meds and sent me on my way.
i’ve had a lot of down time laying around feeling like i have needles in my skin. basically, i’ve been so stressed out that it affected my body’s ability to defend itself from a virus that’s been dormant in my system for 22 years. i don’t know about you, but to me that SCREAMS that i need to make some changes in my life. now if i could just figure out what those changes are…
