Shingles, Anyone?

Each time my husband would venture into our garage, his eyes would fall upon the wheel barrow sitting in there, full of bits and pieces of asphalt shingles, left over from his recent shingling of the new garden shed roof he has been building for the last several months. It's rather a nuisance, to say the least, planning how to dispose of building materials. At one time the municipal waste program accepted modest amounts of such items, but no longer.

Back in the summer he had rented a huge dumpster for the very purpose of loading it up with all manner of construction detritus and other items that had somehow accumulated both without and within our house, over the past twenty years of his various projects. He also loaded it up with soil that he had excavated years earlier, when he had designed and installed patio brickwork and stonework garden retaining walls.

We were incredibly relieved to have done with all of that, felt purged of the burden of unwanted and discarded construction items, breathed a sigh of relief when the-then full-to-capacity dumpster had been hauled off, for all it contained to be recycled. And took great pride that he had been able to clear our property. And then came this new project.

My husband had taken note of a roofing crew working up the street to install a new roof for a neighbour. He had approached them and asked whether they would be amenable to carting away his modest leftovers, along with the mountain of shingle detritus from their roofing job. They kindly acceded to my husband's request, refusing to accept payment in gratitude, although he managed to press it on them.

And then my husband collected my completed Arthritis Society canvass kit and delivered it to the home of the area captain. And when he was finished doing that he drove over to the office of our family doctor, not quite in the same neighbourhood we now live in, but our physician since 1972, when we first moved to Ottawa with our then-young family. He made an appointment for me to see Dr. Sati, later that afternoon.

A week earlier I had been suddenly assailed by a sore throat, what appeared to be a serious ear infection, and then three days ago, a peculiar rash had appeared on my forehead, just below the hairline. I was suffering headaches, most unusual in that I never have headaches. When the good doctor, now aged himself, just like us, saw me, heard my symptom descriptions, checked me, he speedily diagnosed: Shingles.

What, Shingles? Why yes, a viral presence, having slept in my body as it does in all people who have once had Chicken Pox, a form of Herpes, which in some people becomes activated as Shingles. He prescribed an effective drug after hauling out a few of his medical texts to read to me, and to illustrate for me just how the virus is neurological in nature, and what it is capable of doing, in ravaging the human body.

Yesterday evening, I took the first two pills prescribed. And last night I experienced possibly the worst, most painful - one of the most uncomfortably painful, in any event - nights I'd ever passed. As I desperately attempted to fall asleep, descriptions of "pounding misery", "piercing pain", kept running through my head. The right side of my head, as it happens. The right ear, the right side of my throat, my right temple, the right side of my cranium.

Under my hair, the scalp had become incredibly sensitive; I was not able to use a comb or a brush, as a result. The angry red rash that turned to wet pustules that were painful and itchy suddenly appeared elsewhere; the bridge of my nose, my right eyebrow, even at the very edge of my right eyelid. So that, throughout the night, while a raging war was waged in my head, thorns laid under my eyelid kept reminding me that all was amiss.

I await rescue from the immediate effects of this Shingles outbreak. And hope, desperately, that this malady may decide to return in quiescent-viral form back to where it has lodged for the past 65 years, since that time when as a child I had chicken pox. Yet I know that will not be the case, because now I understand I had been misdiagnosed when, on two previous occasions, years apart, I had gone to a neighbourhood health clinic for relief.

From what I then had taken, on the first occasion, to have been an infected spider bite on my midriff which antibiotic had cleared up. On the second occasion, again on my midriff, when a clinic doctor had misdiagnosed me as having an infected gland, and the prescription she gave me had caused the infection to flare up in a rage that left me shaken, in pain, and helpless to understand what had occurred with my body.

Now I know. Who might have imagined that shingles so compromised our lives in those quite different ways; both of which appear to have been solved. Isn't life strange?