I totally got shingles a couple weeks ago! Yeah! : ) Actually, it was pretty lame.
I started out thing it was just a rash cuz I had this itch on my side and it was red. Well, the next day I noticed that there were some bumps there. My wife looked at it and immediately started freaking out because she thought it was shingles. She’s the biggest spaz in the world though, so I didn’t really take it seriously. It got a little worse so by the 2nd day I promised her I would make a doctor appt. My doctor takes one look at it and goes, “Yep, that’s shingles!”
Truth be told, it really wasn’t that bad. It didn’t even start hurting excruciatingly bad like I heard they are supposed to. It just itched and was uncomfortable. My belief was that even if it did start hurting really bad, I was pretty sure I could handle it. After having kidney stones a year ago I’m quite positive I can handle ANY fucking pain in the world. If anyone reading this has ever had them before you totallyl know what I’m talking about.
The worst part of it was the damn medicine. See, shingles is just the street name for this particular ailment, most likely invented because it sounds less gross than the medical term. Its actually a strain of herpes, and as such the treatment is Valtrex. That’s right, the herpes medication. So not only did I have to publicly purchase said herpes medicine (which was just awesome), but it also cost me A HUNDRED FUCKING DOLLARS! With insurance! That comes out to about $5 apiece for every single big blue horse pill. In my mind I’m trying to maintain the illusion that the reason it was so expensive is that I hadn’t met my prescription deductible yet for ‘08. I say illusion because I’m afraid of checking my insurance paperwork and finding out that this is not the case. One night I actually dropped a pill in the sink and was freaking out because I was afraid it went down the drain. At $5 each, you better believe I pulled every damn dish out of that sink to retrieve it! In retrospect, the stuff was probably worth the dough because it worked great. 10 days of pills and they’re gone, only two weeks after they showed up.
My doctor said that nobody really knows the exact cause of them, but its widely believed that stress is a big factor. Gee, I guess its not that much of a surprise considering everything that’s been going on lately. Once I realized this, I started taking a relatively resigned attitude to things. My view was “Whatever. We’ll just deal with it and whatever we have to do we’ll do it.” I pretty much gave up on continuing to live in Lakewood (and buying a house all together) and just decided to give myself to whatever would be best for Devon’s happiness, and thusly, my own sanity. Now that she is willing to give Lakewood another shot and go through with buying the Edwards house (partly because we don’t have much of a choice anymore), we have something to work for and (hopefully) keep our spirits up.
And with my birthday coming up, hopefully we’ll have some good times ahead.







