It Wasn’t Poison Oak

I was working in Yosemite as a camp counselor, so there was no internet access or anything. I started to get a red rash on my chest, and then on the same place on my back, and it started to expand and crawl up towards my armpit. And it hurt, really, really, really bad. As if you had the worst sunburn ever and someone slapped it really hard every time you moved.

I went to see the nurse (a new nurse gets cycled in every week) and she looked at it and goes “Ohhh that’s poison oak!” I was like, really? I haven’t really gone hiking anywhere…, and she assured me that it was poison oak and that I must have accidentally gotten the oils in my clothes or something. She then proceeds to rub in hydrocortisone cream into my chest and back as hard as she can. I’m literally tearing up it’s so painful, and all she can say is, “I know dear, I’m sure it’s painful.” She gave me a bottle of the stuff and some anti-histamine pills and told me it’d be gone in 2 days.

It wasn’t. I couldn’t move without being in terrible agonizing pain. I returned to the nurse and told her, “I don’t think it’s working.” She says to me, Oh, my brother who’s a doctor knows what it is and he doesn’t even need to see you. He says it’s something called “Herpes Zoster.” For those of you who don’t know, Herpes Zoster is Shingles. I had been living with undiagnosed shingles for like 5 days, and at this point the rash was the most disgusting collection of painful, puss-spewing pimples ever.

Ended up getting driven to the closest clinic which is 40 minutes away, and the doctor said it was one of the most severe cases of shingles she’d ever seen. Gave me some Vicodin to put me in “feel good” mode and told me everything would disappear in 3 weeks.

Since that time, I have a rare complication called Post-herpetic Neuralgia in the spot where my shingles was that causes me to feel basically the same pain because my nerve endings are too fucked up in those places. Turns out Hydrocortisone cream is the worst thing you could put on shingles.