[CN – some graphic description of pain]
This right here? This is the space where there was going to be a completely different post. A post that was far more nuanced, that I’ve been doing research on, and taking notes. That I’ve been thinking about an awful lot. There is supposed to be a play along at home component to it. It was the mission statement of the new leaf I’m turning over. It was going to be positive!
You know that saying about the best laid plans of mice and men. Yeah, I actually had no idea what the figure of speech really meant, or where it came from; I only knew you were supposed to say it when your shit got fucked up or didn’t turn out the way you wanted. But I’m pleased to report that it originated in a Robert Burns poem (To A Mouse, 1786). That guy. Helluva guy. That’s a post for another time, isn’t it.
Anyway, back to the topic at hand. I have been waylaid this week by something very unexpected. I have come down with not the worst, but a significantly bad case of shingles.
For those of you who may not know what shingles is, it is basically an extension of chickenpox, after several decades of respite in which the virus apparently was shooting steroids and snorting angel dust inside your body. It usually strikes people much older than me, like retirement age people. But then again, I do get all the random diseases. There was the scarlet fever in 2010. And the norovirus…I think that was 2012. (What’s up with the even years?)
I had chickenpox when I was five-years-old. I stayed home from school and played and itched a little bit. This is nothing like that.
Shingles is an ailment of your nerves. It usually flares up along a specific nerve or branch of nerves. It results in a rash of burning, itchy blisters, as well as pain along the nerve. It’s usually also only on one side of your body. A lot of people get it along their ribs on their back, starting at the middle and trailing out to either the left or right flank. In my case, it’s running down my sciatic on my left leg.
So, as we speak, there are patches of blisters down the back of my left leg from just below my buttocks down to just above my knee, that itch so badly and in the most painful way an itch has ever itched on my body. I am very much considering defecting from my skin.
The nerve pain feels as though someone or something has some how gotten a tiny, dull, pink, disposable razor inside my leg, and is dragging it down my nerve, nicking and razor-burning it as they go.
Finally, every once in a while, there’s what feels like a flaming hot fencing sword stabbed into the back of my leg or lower butt region.
And there is nothing that will make it stop. I have taken Advil and Aleve. I have smeared every kind of first aid-itch-burn cream-lotion-salve on it, and it feels better for maybe five minutes, but then it’s right back to where it is.
So, no, there will not be a nuanced, well thought out, researched post tonight. I cannot be coherent. I just want to amputate my leg, basically. Fuck it!
Just sayin’.
Peggy Lu Who's Just Sayin' 