A week ago, I started feeling some soreness in my right side, and noticed a raised, bumpy area on the right side of my back and torso. I thought at first that it was a sudden onset of acne, and panicked because... well, how would you feel if you thought you were getting zits in a big, concentrated area on your back? I did what I’d like to think many people would have done: I jumped in the shower and scrubbed my back feverishly.

After a day or so, it turned into a red, swollen rash, and I thought I recognized the familiar sign of poison oak or poison ivy. I am highly allergic to both, and I’ve trained myself to stay away from them, after a painful episode in which I learned to identify them the hard way. I was fairly disgusted with myself for having somehow gotten into poison oak or poison ivy and not realized it. Still, it struck me as odd, because it was only on the right side of my back and torso, in one band that seemed to be spreading incrementally. It wasn’t on my hands, so I wondered how it could have gotten to my back without getting on my hands.

The last time I had a severe outbreak of poison oak/ivy was in college. I was doing a leaf collection for a biology class. I gathered and pressed what I thought were leaves from one tree or another, but they turned out to be poison oak and poison ivy that must have been growing ON the tree. Hey, I never said I was John Gerard. After pressing the leaves and getting their toxins all over me, I came down with a case of poison oak/ivy that should have been documented in medical text books. I was in bed for a week with my eyes swollen shut, glowing like a red coal. It was an awful experience.

This time, though, it wasn't quite the same. So after a couple of days, I began to doubt that it was poison oak, since it wasn’t spreading through accidental contact to my eyes, lips, etc. I take Allegra daily for allergies, and I was using calamine lotion, but nothing was helping the original band of sores. They were just getting more pronounced, more painful, and concentrating themselves more and more in a band around my right torso and back.

Long story short, I called my momma. Mom is a nurse, and she’s pretty good at a quick diagnosis. She took one look at my back and said “That might be shingles.” This was yesterday afternoon. Last night I went to work, where a co-worker looked up the symptoms of shingles on the net for me, and I thought it might be a match. Coincidentally, last night was when the bumpy rash decided to make itself known as forcefully as possible. The pain started getting pretty bad, even a fan blowing across my shirt was painful. My boss asked me what was wrong, and I pulled up my shirt and showed him the bright red milky way that was throbbing on my right torso. My boss said “Go to the hospital. Now.”

I went to the hospital, and I was diagnosed with shingles. The doctor gave me medicine and Vicodin for the pain, and sent me home to rest.

Just for the record, David Letterman's list of the Top Ten Good Things about Having Shingles is pretty thorough.

If you’ve ever had chicken pox, you are a candidate for a battle with shingles later in life. What happens is, the virus that causes chicken pox seems to be beaten when you get better from that childhood disease, but in reality, it’s retreated from the skin to the nervous system, and is waiting to flare back up when you least expect it. I had a severe case of chicken pox in fourth grade, accompanied by intense fever, seizures, etc... I beat the chicken pox, but not the virus, which was hiding in my right side, waiting to strike again. It gets its chance when the immune system is weakened due to stress or another ailment.

Compared to many shingles sufferers, I haven’t had it too bad. My ex-wife had shingles as a kid, and she’s described to me an absolute hell of pain and suffering. Many shingles sufferers describe an unrelenting pain. For me, the pain comes and goes... the tingling and burning stays with me. As of this morning, the pain feels more like a muscle ache instead of the hot, branding-rod sensations I was getting off and on yesterday and last night. Mostly, right now, I just feel like I took a bad beating and now I’m sore. Compared to some shingles sufferers, who describe the experience as something like the Spanish Inquisition, I’m pretty lucky.

Nonetheless, I hope that somehow, somebody will learn from my mistakes. If you had chicken pox as a kid, and if you get a painful rash that forms a band along one side of the torso, the waist, or the face and neck, DO NOT assume that it is or isn't anything. Not acne, not poison oak, not anything. Go see a doctor and have it looked into right away. It’s worth it, because if it turns out to be shingles, you’ll want to have it treated ASAP.

This link has a picture of the symptoms, if you're interested. It's a bit gnarly, so don't click it if you're kinda squeamish. Here's a chart I stole from msnbc, if you're interested in a clinical kinda thing: