Shingles, (Thirteen Ways cont'd. some more)

7.

I had shingles on the left side of my head and face. So now I have scars on and residual pain in my chin, cheek, temple, scalp, ear canal, in front of the ear, and even at the base of the head (that’s the back of the head). Only on the left side. I had no shingles on my nose or above my eye or in my eye, which is good, since shingles in those place would have caused me to lose the sight in the eye and maybe even lose the eye itself.

8.

Pain? Yes. Shingles attack the nerves, in my case, all the nerves that “serve” the head and face, particularly the large nerve that runs along the cheek and jaw. At the beginning the pain is like a neuralgia, and the skin and, in my case, the teeth become sensitive to the touch and ultra sensitive to cold air. As the shingles take hold, the pain changes and intensifies.

* * *

I just think you should know these things.

Shingles, (Thirteen Ways cont'd.)

5.

Here’s the story on how you get shingles. And how you don’t. You don’t catch it from someone who has shingles, even if the blisters are as described above in #1. What you can catch then is chicken pox, if you’ve never had them (Kemper 137). That should also make it clear that you can’t get shingles unless you’ve already had chicken pox.

I had chicken pox when I was about four years old, one pock, actually, and I used to brag about it because I didn’t know then what I learned when I got shingles: that the chicken pox virus (herpes) stays in your body ever after, lying dormant somewhere in the spine, and if and when it is reactivated, you get shingles somewhere on one side of your body—that side corresponding to the place in your spine where the herpes virus slept. (It’s a nervous system thing.) And obviously it doesn’t matter if you had one pock or a hundred of them.

Here’s where the zoster part comes in. You get shingles in a certain zone, the pain and sores forming a belt-like pattern around the waste, for instance, but not all the way around. By the way, I have heard it said that if you ever got shingles on both sides of your body at once, you would die. But I don’t know if that’s truth or folklore.

My Healthwise Handbook says that no one knows how the chicken pox virus becomes activated again (Kemper 137), but I don’t believe that. The handbook continues, “Shingles is more common in older adults [I resent that remark] and people who have weakened immune systems [stress can weaken the immune system, right?], but can affect anyone who has had chicken pox [that we already knew]” (137).

6.

Now, about where you really get shingles. I sat in the living room of a family whose three-year-old boy had full-blown raging chicken pox. In fact, the couch I sat on was wet and smelled of urine, probably his. We’ll not go into how I could have sat in urine and just stayed there sitting in it. That’s probably a different story.

Within two weeks I had shingles. I had no doubt where I got shingles or, I should say, how. But most medical professionals you speak to these days will say—and most I spoke to did say—“Oh no. That’s not the way it happens.” Other people told me that, too. In fact, I heard, “Oh no. That’s not the way it happens” so much that I actually gave in and said, “Okay, they’re probably right.”

Then one medical professional said, when I told him I had had shingles—and he’s been a doctor for a long time—“Who were you with who had chicken pox? And, by the way, don’t go over to Caldwell on Spring Break. It’s a full-scale chicken pox epidemic over there every year. Easy to pick up shingles.” Hallelujah! I was right.

Bullets in the meantime

• I have a bright green katydid clinging to the flagpole holder on my front porch. I have tried to get a picture of it from inside the house, but it's pretty small. What is a katydid doing here? I know little about them. But I knew enough to think it was a katydid, then came in here and looked it up. Sure enough.
  
• I have not moved from my house today. I mean I haven't left my house. The fault of the ob-gyn dr I "saw" last Tuesday, who insisted I get a flu shot. A little voice inside me was saying, "No. Don't." But the dr said, "I wouldn't want you to get the flu." Guess what! I got the shot, then I got the flu.
• Those Asian singles really want me. Another plea today.
  
• I am chewing Black Jack gum, a birthday gift, along with a pack each of Clove and Beemans. The three kinds of gum my dad chewed. He always had them, I think.
• My garage door opener, the one just outside my back utility room door, no longer works. I can't find the right spot. So I have to open the other door, go out, and then use the pad. Think I'll look for a remote. Should be one in here somewhere.
  

Shingles

Several years ago I had shingles. Not nice. Not fun.
I have written something about it, looking back at Wallace Stevens' Thirteen Ways poem. Mine is not a poem.
Here are 1-4.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at Shingles

1.

If they’re full-blown, red, puffy, and weeping, it’s best not to.

2.

It’s a virus. (Isn’t everything?) The herpes virus, the same one that causes chicken pox, cold sores (herpes simplex), and genital herpes. Well, it isn’t just a virus that causes genital herpes, now, is it. So I will modify that explanation in this way: herpes is the virus present in all the above conditions.

3.

Shingles itself is called herpes zoster. Zoster coming from the Latin through Greek and meaning girdle-like, a belt or zone (Webster’s 1668). This definition should become clear in #4.

4.

If you still think we’re talking about a roof here, then I don’t know what to say about you as a reader.

Names, Part 4

But back to Janae, that’s Enola. She was my student and stayed after class sometimes to unload her stories, the things troubling her, which she said she never talks about and always holds in which is why she is suffering from some kind of depression and has a weight problem, although she’s always had that and has been teased and tormented her life long because of it, and this is just the way she talked, hardly stopping long enough for breath and certainly not long enough for me to say anything but oh my or wow.

She was--is, I'm sure--a sweet young woman, not obese but, as my mother would have said, heavy. She also enjoyed, although in this case that cannot be the right word, the particular body shape where the lower part is large. Even if Janae lost fifty pounds, she would look large below the waist.

Her first day of school—that’s kindergarten—the day all children look to with a mix of fear and happy excitement, someone actually put her into a trash can. She says this is absolutely true, hard to believe though it may be, and no teacher was nearby to save her from this humiliation.

She could not understand it—and neither can I. Her older sisters always talked about school as the best part of their day, which is what Janae went expecting. But such was not her experience. She was excluded from fun, from girls’ athletic teams, and was publicly ridiculed for her “lack of discipline and intelligence” by the PE teacher, a woman without a heart, obviously, and not much of a brain.

There's more, of course, but it's all in the past, you know.

Why am I writing all this? I do not know. What I originally thought was that the four names I began with sound like they come from the back woods part of this nation of ours. And couldn’t you write quite a story about them?

Apparently I can’t. At least I haven't so far.

Names, Part 3

I have loved my own name, the middle one, that is, Carol. I don’t dislike Alyce, went by it all through my public school education, and gave it to my second daughter. But Carol is my real, my true name. It is a song, and my mother used to say that she gave me the name because I was her little song. I like that story, but mostly I just like the name for me.

My mother was Lola. It’s not a common name, not heard much, but I liked it for my mother, and when my first daughter was born on my mother’s birthday, I named her Lola.

There was a 69-year gap between those two namings. I wondered if my daughter would like her name, its old-fashioned quality. I hoped she would like sharing her grandma’s name. But it might be possible, I thought, that she would hate it. Her friends were Lisas, Julies, Jennys, and Stephanies. Lola clearly marked her as not of the cute name crowd; sometimes that’s hard for a kid to live with.

Not Lola. She loves her name, always did, even though her brothers called her loaf and many have called her Lola granola (I was often Carol-barrel). But those things don’t matter if you like your name. If it fits you. And Lola fits her. It’s hers alone. She knows no one else with the name and likes it that way. Good.

And, while I’m on this small and quite pointless discussion of my children’s names, Alyce likes her name, and Ann likes hers, except that she is our only child without a middle name, and that made her mad when she was a little girl. She got over it.

My boys? Wayne, Paul, Andrew, and Richard. I thought they were all happy with their names, even though I knew Andrew did not like his middle name, Harold. I was surprised and a little saddened to learn that he doesn't like Andrew all that much either. Wow. I am sorry.