Sh*t! It's Shingles!

Hey there!

Long time, no see, eh?

Let me tell you, life has just been a bowl of....herpes around here. haha

First, Antonio came down with shingles.

Talk about painful.

Although it typically occurs in senior citizens, it can strike people of almost ANY age, provided they've had the chickenpox at some time in their life.

Shingles and chickenpox are both strains of the herpes virus.... Basically, when you get chickenpox, the virus doesn't go away completely. It lies, hiding, in the base of your nerves. Usually just in one area of your body. It can be "awakened" by a weakened immune system or from stress. We're assuming that stress was the alarm clock in Antonio's case. It hit him about a day after he quit his day job to start his own business. Great timing, huh?

He tried to deal with it without medical intervention for almost a week but the pain was too great. I took him in to an Urgent Care clinic and they proceeded to tell him that he had an unusually horrid case of them. It was over the span of SEVERAL nerve areas. It was the worst they had ever seen. His doctor called in the other doctors and nurses to take a look at it. They even took pictures to show to medical students. It was that bad. Poor Antonio.

They put him on Valtrex (a herpes medicine) and a pill to alleviate nerve pain and to ward off future nerve pain that can plague a person for YEARS who's had shingles.

They also have him a lidocaine cream but he preferred my method of soothing the blisters: burned flour (the same as I use for diaper rashes). He said that it made them less itchy and seemed to dry them up faster.

The doctor ventured to say that Antonio would begin healing about 2-3 weeks after his appointment and beginning to take medicine, but it actually began clearing up about a week after his doctor's visit!

The above two pictures were taken a few days ago.

He is doing so much better now.

Hopefully he is done with shingles, though we have heard that it can reoccur at anytime.

We are praying it doesn't.

He said that it felt like he was being electrocuted and on fire.

It was bad.

A word of caution..and a precursor to what was about to happen to us a couple of weeks after he began showing signs of shingles: A person with shingles cannot pass shingles on to another person. They are, however, extremely contagious for....chickenpox....