Getting the Shingles

This piece may as well be entitled  ‘Why We Need to Go to a Doctor.’  There’s always a lesson to be learned about self-medication.  Somehow I never learned it well enough until it’s too late.  It started with just one little skin eruption on my upper lip, the kind that one mistakes for a pimple but with a difference; its stinging pain is palpable.

I blamed its appearance on the weakening of my resistance brought about by sleeplessness.  As a night person, I look forward to evenings for the luxury of real relaxation, mostly by reading.  I’ve run out of things to read where I am now, but as real as the nights are long there will always be something to do for one who seeks it.

There are new word games in my laptop.  These made me momentarily forget that nights are for sleeping.  So I played like there’s no tomorrow.  On the average, playtime meant right after dinner up to 3 or 4 a.m.  Sometimes, it meant looking around, seeing light, hearing dogs bark to announce another day, and seeing people stir, preparing for the day.  Still I kept pounding at the computer to increase my score.  What I got for the effort was this skin eruption on my upper lip.

Don’t get me wrong; I have nothing against doctors.  Truly, they are the go-to people for physical emergencies as the tabernacle or St. Jude are what we may choose to go to in spiritual emergencies.  It’s just that despite my being a bonafide card-carrying health-insured person, I avoid doctors for as long as I can.  I can’t stand a five-hour wait, honest, like getting an appointment at 8 a.m. and meeting the doctor only at past noontime.

So, because I thought that mine was just a minor skin eruption, I treated it with what I believed was a topical cure-all Chinese ointment, the kind that one buys on the sidewalk for 10 pesos.  The skin eruption didn’t go away, so I treated it some more.  After three days and a slight fever, I looked at the mirror and saw Miss Piggy staring back.  My upper lip had swollen so disproportionately, smiling the slightest meant excruciating pain.  I much prefer to look like Kermit the Frog, I told my kid sister as I tried to sing The Rainbow Connection to find out what my upper lip can still do.

Still I resisted going to the doctor despite my sister’s prodding.  If I go, I’d rather go straight to hospital admission, went my reasoning, which means another long wait at the emergency room.  I did the next best thing:  call my niece who happens to be a doctor.  She prescribed a medicine and advised a strong dose of Vitamin C to hasten the healing.  It’s viral, she pointed out.
I’m considering going to a local healer who I heard can make this disappear with herbs and chants, I said.  That’s crazy, she answered.  I got it wrong again.  Saying it to a bonafide medical doctor must be a crime.  It seems that a small skin eruption is making me wrong at all turns.

Those are shingles.  I had them before.  At our age, we are more vulnerable.  Those are caused by stress.  There’s a specific medicine for that, the kind that works for chicken pox.  Go, see a doctor, a college chum of mine said over the phone.  Our meeting had been postponed so many times, and now I was giving her one more reason why it had to be called off again.  And I thought shingles are about roof covering or sidings of a house that contractors bother about.

Shingles, or herpes zoster, is an “acute viral infection affecting the skin and nerves, characterized by groups of small blisters appearing along certain nerve segments.”  A close cousin of shingles is herpes simplex, “associated with infections in and around the mouth, characterized by a cluster of small blisters commonly called cold sores or fever blisters.”

Zoster or simplex, whatever, mine is herpes, or ogahip in local parlance, said to normally heal within six to ten days.  My healing would take longer though because of the secondary infection caused by self-medication.  It has complicated my schedule that I had to postpone my trip back to Dubai to an unknown date, inclusive of the airline fine for second flight postponements.  There’s a lesson to be learned about self-medication.  Too bad I learned it the hard way.

(15 July 2007)