The Shingles

Ohemgee! I have shingles, my friends. And my doctor advised me to take a two-week sick leave in isolation because apparently, I am highly contagious.

Shingles, or herpes zoster (okay, it’s different from the herpes simplex that we call cold sores), is a painful skin rash due to the same virus that causes chickenpox. It comes with blisters on the skin usually limited to only one part of the body. If you had chickenpox when you were a child, the virus can become dormant in certain nerves in the body, but decades later, it can become active for reasons that experts haven’t figured out yet.

When I was in Cebu last weekend, I started feeling the numbness and the “pins and needles” tingling from my right forearm down to my fingers. I was thinking, maybe it was Carpal Tunnel Syndrome because the Hubby has it, and the numbness was similar. But when the rashes and red, big blisters came out, and no amount of Dermovate or Triderm could contain its spread, I was alarmed. I was even having a hard time driving already. My forefinger was the one really suffering—it’s like a needle was perpetually stuck on it. So today I went to my son’s dermatologist during my lunch break. Thus, her prognosis—shingles, or tikos in Ilonggo.

So I’m now trapped in one room in our house, with minimal contact with my family, with only my loyal laptop beside me.

What a sad, sad two-week ‘vacation’ this is going to be.