ryan kennedy’s blog

I had a lovely weekend with a brilliant outbreak of some sort of rash on my torso. Yeah, you probably didn’t need to know that, but trust me…this is going somewhere. It wasn’t really getting better today, but I’ve been suffering through it figuring it would clear up soon on its own.

Then my wife stumbled on an article about shingles. Pay dirt, every symptom lined up pretty well with everything I was experiencing. So I went to my doctor to get checked out. She had me lift up my shirt and asked, “what do you think it is?” I told her I suspected it was shingles and she told me I was right.

So she sent me to the pharmacy to pick up some meds. In this case, Valtrex. You may have seen it marketed on television…for herpes. Let me just say, there’s nothing quite like going to a pharmacy to pick up your herpes meds. I’m sure she didn’t mean to, but the pharmacist came over to give me a consult on the medication and said, “this is for…well you know what it’s for.” It was very accusatory, I felt like I ought to be heading to the confessional. “Excuse me father for I have sinned. I’m taking herpes meds for my…herpes, which were in no way sexually transmitted.” Awkward.

Anyway, I’m hoping that the Valtrex clears things up soonish. The doctor told me that I’d be spared a good bit of pain since I’m young, but just the same, it’s pretty uncomfortable. It starts below my left pectoral and runs around the side to my back. The bit on my back makes it uncomfortable to sit back against a chair.

Anyway, if you’re curious, I recommend reading the wikipedia article I linked above on shingles. It’s good to know what the symptoms are because the sooner you can start treatment the better off you are. I went 4-5 days before seeing a doctor and they prefer more like 3. It’s also interesting to see what it is (it’s basically the old chicken pox virus waking up), what causes it (stress, in some cases) and it’s spreadability (basically don’t touch my blisters if you haven’t had chicken pox before, unless you’d like chicken pox). My doctor tells me that I’m not at risk to spread chicken pox as long as I wash my hands and don’t hug people.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 4th, 2006 at 5:10 pm and is filed under Health, Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.