Shingles

I’m basically a healthy person. I came through the Pandemic unscathed. I wash my hands as soon as i come home. So it was quite a shock to be diagnosed with shingles - completely out of the blue.

On Tursday morning I woke up to find my eyelid really swollen up and a rash developing on my forehead. What could this be? Should I just rest and hope it would go away? It didn’t seem serious enough to go to the doctor. In any case, it’s virtually impossible to get a same day appointment. At about 4.00 pm I finally did call, asking for an appointment next morning. They said I could see the Nurse Practitioner.

This man was experienced. He took one look at me and said you’ve got shingles.  On his computer, he called up a diagram of an eye and coloured the affected areas in red. Because it was near my eye, he sent me straight away to the eye doctor who had a surgery in the medical clinic next door. It can be serious and cause blindness. After an hour's wait, the eye doctor told me there was nothing visibly wrong inside the eye. I was safe to drive home because they had only put drops in the left eye to dilate it.

Not a pretty sight!

After two days taking the Valaciclovir tablets, there has been no improvement. I wake up with the eyelid and area below so swollen up that I can hardly see out (more than in the photo above). I think I'll just go back to bed and hope for the best. 

When I googled shingles, I discovered that some people have a headache or unbearable pain. Others find the itching intolerable. The Nurse Practitioner told me to put my hands behind my back and pretend I'd got handcuffs on. Living in Singapore for seven years, I had trained myself never to scratch mosquito bite, so I didn't think this would be a problem. I just need to distract myself: I'm reading the latest, and last, Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries.