{"id":461,"date":"2017-04-29T11:30:45","date_gmt":"2017-04-29T15:30:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/?p=461"},"modified":"2017-04-29T14:54:45","modified_gmt":"2017-04-29T18:54:45","slug":"hanging-the-shingles-out","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/hanging-the-shingles-out\/","title":{"rendered":"Hanging the Shingles Out"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
At least I don’t look like this. Yet.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Last\u00a0Saturday night I developed an earache, only \u201cearache\u201d sounds too childlike\u00a0and innocent for what was going on. It felt like someone was pounding a knitting needle into my ear canal over and over. The stabbing pain woke me up out of a dead sleep any time I dozed off.<\/p>\n

I managed to get the pain somewhat under control with Tylenol, which shocked me. Because I\u2019m on blood thinners, I\u2019m limited to Tylenol for my painkilling needs (Advil and aspirin don\u2019t play nicely with blood thinners), and Tylenol is generally about as useful as jellybeans for pain relief. And\u00a0the jellybeans taste better.<\/p>\n

When I was getting lunch on Sunday, I felt a sharp pain like a bug bite on my upper right eyelid. I didn\u2019t see any red mark, but I could feel the sting. The next morning, my eyelid was red and puffy when I looked in the mirror. And I was still having dreadful head pain on and off, though I didn\u2019t realize these things were related at the time. That afternoon, I had several raised bumpy marks on the right side of my forehead over my eyebrow. Boy, that\u2019s weird<\/em>, I thought. How the heck did I not notice a bug biting me that many times?<\/em><\/p>\n

The next morning, my right eyelid was extremely puffed out and I had a distinct rash forming there. The marks on my forehead were getting redder and more defined too. I must have had an allergic reaction to something, I figured. Maybe I touched something caustic and then swept my hand over my forehead; the marks did follow the general pattern my hand takes when I sweep hair out of my face.<\/p>\n

Things looked even nastier on Wednesday morning and I decided it was time to see the doctor. Before the appointment, I started Googling weird face rashes. That led me to some pictures of people who had shingles on their faces. And when I saw them, I thought \u201cOh shit<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

When I went to the doctor, he took one look at my face and said \u201cYep, that\u2019s shingles.\u201d He put me on Valtrex right away, as antivirals are only useful to stop shingles in the first three days after the rash appears and I was already on day two. Fortunately, those big blue horse pills seem to be doing the trick; no new rashes, and the ones I have seem to be drying up already.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m hoping I won\u2019t be a poxy mess for too long, but even more so, I\u2019m ready for the pain to depart. The head pain that comes along with these is just unreal; I wouldn\u2019t wish it on anyone. Amazingly enough, Tylenol still works to tamp the pain down for a few hours, but you can\u2019t overdo Tylenol or else your liver will explode. Sigh.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m only babbling on about all this\u00a0just to pat myself on the back because I still met my writing commitments for the week. I posted my 16th 50-word horror story<\/a> on Monday as usual. The Weekly Knob\u2019s writing prompt was \u201ctwist tie\u201d and while I developed\u00a0an idea and an outline on Tuesday, I felt so rotten for most of the week that I wasn\u2019t sure I\u2019d be able to write a whole story.\u00a0But the Tylenol gave me a few pain-free time blocks every day and I decided I\u2019d feel worse if I didn\u2019t at least try to submit something, so I finally got the thing\u00a0written<\/a>. I don\u2019t know if it\u2019s my best effort, but I\u2019m giving myself a break.<\/p>\n

Hell; because I couldn’t find any stock photo images suitable for the story (twist ties not being an especially popular stock photography subject, it seems), I even had\u00a0to create\u00a0my own. So it was an extra-creative week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last\u00a0Saturday night I developed an earache, only \u201cearache\u201d sounds too childlike\u00a0and innocent for what was going on. It felt like…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[8,5],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/461"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=461"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/461\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":466,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/461\/revisions\/466"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=461"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=461"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=461"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}