In November 2011, I started feeling more tired than usual. Extremely fatigued in fact. As I'll be 83 this year I'm quite used to having an hour's sleep in the afternoon (particularly if I've had a good lunch and a glass or two of red wine.) But this was an unheathy sort of fatigue. I felt tired and unwell. Then I became aware of pain in my right side. Or rather, not in my right side but on the skin under my ribs on the right side. I looked in the mirror on my wardrobe and saw I had developed a long sweep of what looked light reddish bruises stretching from under my ribs round to my back.
I'm luck that I have a diligent young doctor who doesn't mine making house calls to elderly patients. When he came to examine me, he diagnosed shingles very quickly. "It'll take several weeks to heal" he said "but at least we've caught it and diagnosed it quickly so you can start on antivirals straight away."
I started taking the medication within 3 days of getting the first symptoms and apparently, with shingles, the earlier you start treatment the better. What I didn't know at the time was that shingles is very common in people over 80 and that very often it leads on to another painful condition - post-shingles neuralgia.
Anyway, for six weeks I was housebound. I was so tired that I stayed in bed most of the day. If I got up in the morning and made tea and ate some breakfast, I'd need to go back to bed by about 10am. Friends and family came in to help me - to make meals for me, offer a cup of tea or just chat. But mostly I needed to be alone. Shingles makes you feel pretty awful and you just need to doze and sleep to recover.
A lot of people, including a friend who is a retired doctor, asked me if the illness was very painful. Shingles is apparently often extremely painful as it makes your nerve endings flare up with inflammation. At first, I mostly felt discomfort rather than real pain. But that changed and after six weeks I really needed painkillers. My doctor prescribed me a medication that I found out was actually an anti-depressant. Not only that, but my daughter read the instruction leaflet and saw that a side-effect of the drug was feeling suicidal. "Right" she said "you're not taking these. You might be in pain but we're not having you throw yourself off the balcony!"
So we went into town, to Guildford, to Boots to see if the pharmacist could recommend something better. One complication is that I take Warfarin for a heart arrhythmia. If you take Warfarin you can't take aspirin or any other anti-coagulant because you risk making your blood too thin. If that happens and you cut yourself, you can lose a lot of blood. And even if you don't cut yourself, thin blood can make you feel very fatigued. And fatigue was already one of the strongest symptoms of shingles that I was experiencing....
The Boots pharmacist sold me some sort of painkiller which she said wasn't contraindicated with Warfarin. But it didn't seem to make any difference. I still had the pain - a sort of inflammation - a burning pain. The marks on my side were still evident after several weeks too.
My generation went through the second world war so I suppose we learnt not to make a fuss about things unless they're really important. I knew that the pain of shingles wasn't dangerous or life-threatening so that made it easier to tolerate. After six weeks stuck in my flat, I slowly started to go out once in a while. I could still get very tired and the pain was still there but I had a little more energy and regained my interest in life. By Christmas 2011, I was feeling quite a lot better and spent the holiday with my daughter and her family in London. We ate well and drank plenty of champagne and wine so I'd have to say I was on the road to recovery.
Still, it's January 2012 now and I still have the red marks on my side and some residual pain. My doctor told me that once an older person recovers from shingles they're quite likely to suffer from post-shingles neuralgia and it appears that's what I've got. It means the nerves in my skin continue to be inflamed and cause pain. It's a flipping nuisance sometimes. At 82, I really want to enjoy the time I have left and so I hope for good health. Some days I feel like I'm falling apart. I'm partially sighted, have various aches and pains, a heart condition for which I take Warfarin and Digoxin, and arthritis which sometimes bugs me and sometimes doesn't.
On the other hand, I'm soon off to visit my daughter for a few days and then in May the family has the wedding of my oldest granddaughter to look forward to. I've stocked up on talking books as I love reading but can't see well enough these days. And I have family I love and plenty of good friends. So all in all, I'm not complaining about shingles or post-shingles neuralgia. I'll file them under those little things that are sent to try us.
