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Call me Uncle Joe

3 min read

I am Uncle Joe.

I have become Uncle Joe and Aunt Ethel and the rest of the older relatives I would see a few times a year but would hear about more often – always in conversations about their latest ailments.

“Uncle Joe has shingles. Oh, how he’s suffering.”

As a kid, I’d hear this sort of thing a lot, usually from my grandmother. There I’d be in her little kitchen, watching as she peeled and chopped a bushel of apples and listening to the latest tales of woe about some extended branch of the family tree.

The shingles. I probably conjured square tiles on rooftops, but I knew it was something on the human body, and judging from the hushed tones in which the news of this malady was delivered, it had to be bad.

Well now that I’m Uncle Joe, I’m here to tell you, my grandmother was right. Shingles is bad. Or should it be shingles are bad? Whatever, this hurts.

I’m going on week three of this funhouse of pain, and I still can’t sit back when I drive. After a week of feeling a strange ache in my shoulder blade, I noticed my skin back there was very, very sore. Others would look and report there was nothing. More than once, I was told it was all in my head.

For a week, I walked around looking and feeling like I had an arrow sticking out of the left side of my back. Each day, I’d ask others to inspect things, but there was nothing. By then, I’d been Googling my symptoms with embarrassing frequency. This was either a shingles outbreak waiting to happen, or one of several much worse illnesses.

And so I stopped hoping for my back to feel better and started hoping that the dang rash would finally show up.

And it did, right below the shoulder blade. I can think of two or maybe three worse body places for the rash, but this was bad enough. I could not wear a bra, which limited my ability to leave the house because, ha ha, nobody wants to see that.

Funny thing, shingles. Motrin and Tylenol can’t touch it. There’s a pain medicine called Neurontin that’s prescribed, but a side effect is utter stupidity. In fact, they should put those words in a black box on the front of the bottle. My motto around here is “Better braless than stupid,” and so I’m coping by keep things from touching my back.

It’s not until you get a hateful rash on your back that you realize how much your back puts up with every day. Unless you are on a topless beach, your back always has something touching it. As I write this, I am sitting way forward in my chair.

Google tells me that shingles occur when those who have had chicken pox suffer a stress to their immune system. I don’t know what stress may have brought this on, but I can tell you that the stress and exhaustion of having shingles would be the perfect thing to trigger a shingles outbreak. What a terrible sentence that was, but you’ll see.

Then again, maybe you don’t have to see what I mean. There’s a shingles vaccination. I’ve been telling my loved ones to go get one. I sure wish I had. This is no fun.

Poor Uncle Joe.

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