ryan r roth and his photographs

My mind almost went blank.

Every thursday at 8:57pm an alarm goes off on my phone. It’s telling me to take out the trash. When I’m lounging around the house, I’m usually wearing the yoga pants I got last year before my surgery. I took the trash out to the curb, looked up, around, and thought to myself - ‘I should go for a run’. So that’s what I did. I took to the streets of boulder for a quick 2.5 mile run.

As the night wore on, I began to get some discomfort on the outside of my left hip (not my surgery hip). Preparing for bed, I saw something rather unexpected - a decent sized rash where I was having said discomfort.

Not really concerned by it - because it was just annoying more than anything - I decided to ride it out for the weekend to see if it’d go away. Honestly, I was also hoping to avoid a copayment at the doc’s office. But by Monday the doozie was still there, and I was getting a little frightened. The nurse practioner (that’s right - not a doc or a p.a) checked me out and had all sorts of theories about what it could be. But mostly she seemed dumbfounded and required a few moments in silence to think it out.

She ran through her ideas out loud, asking me questions along the way. Finally she had it. Ryan - you’ve got Shingles.

WTF!?!

Yep, I’m positive that’s what you have, she told me. And then my brain went from blank to hyperdrive. I really didn’t know what shingles was, except that old people get it. And wait, I’m young, as healthy as can be, an athlete no less….how, why??? And wait, you’re a nurse! But she had already offered to get the doc to confirm it. And then I found myself in the hall already out the door for blood tests.

I came back to the examining room and waited for the doc. When she arrived I - oh you now - pulled down my pants for the third time in the matter of an hour.

“Oh ya”, the doc exclaimed, “That’s shingles”. She said something about being stressed out and  a suppressed immune systed - then she left. Really, that’s all I get? Regardless, that was a hell of a confirmation, and about the quickest diagnosis I’ve ever had. The nurse went on to tell me that the technical name is “Herpes zoster”, not Herpes Simplex mind you. And that normally patients experience much more pain than I was having, that It’s like grown up chicken pox except people don’t usually get it until after 60, that I wasn’t contagious, yadda yadda yadda.

So, now I’m having day dreams about owning a microscope so I can check out this here shingles face to face. But I don’t know anything about microscopes or shingles or cells or viruses. I guess I’ll just keep going to my bio class.

Filed by ryanroth at March 13th, 2008 under Dijyano, Life