So If You Are 40+ and Doc Recommends A Shingles Shot...

[SteyrAUG]

Go get it.

All my life Shingles has been explained to me as something like adult chicken pox and I listened to a lot of dipshits talk about how the vaccine made them way more sick and who cares about a temporary rash thing.

Well the truth of the matter is it's a bit more like adult POLIO. I had a very minor rash, something I attributed to mowing the lawn on a really hot day. Perhaps this is a heat rash or something...after all I'm getting older.

But then my left side began to hurt. Chest, side and back and I thought maybe I slept funny or took more hits than I remember last sparring session. Then I found myself pressing on muscles and thinking "holy crap" where are the bruises because this F'ing hurts. Next day I felt like I owed the mafia $20,000 and didn't have it so three Vito's worked me over with baseball bats.

Thinking perhaps this might not resolve itself I contact my doctor about an appointment and when he told me "shingles" I thought that's BS...shingles is just a itchy rash.

Turns out I was very, very misinformed. Seems it's actually a virus that attacks nerves in the body that sometimes manifests itself with a skin rash. The chicken pox you might have had as a child might technically be the same virus but the experience is very different.

I'm also pretty resistant to the idea of pain killers beyond ibuprofen so I told my doc to skip that, I'll tough it out and lets just get going on the drugs that actually stop the nerve damage. Good idea and bad idea, I have a pretty high pain threshold but HOLY CRAP did that hurt. And for a month it hurt really bad, like insanely bad. I'm now about seven weeks in and things are starting to be normal and I can go through a day without a nerve band lighting up and momentarily crippling me.

In my adult experience I have been beaten, stabbed a couple times and hit with more blunt instruments than most people still walking around and shingles was still a uniquely painful experience for me. If I could have gone back in time and gotten a shingles shot and skipped the entire experience I'd have gladly paid $1,000 to do that instead.

So in short, if you are at that age...go get the shot and save yourself a lot of needless suffering. And if anyone tells you the shot is worse than the virus, you have my permission to tell them to FRO.