Jingle Shingles

I have Shingles. That's what the abdominal/back pain was. From a weird stomach discomfort three days ago, it developed into immense pain last night, waking me at 7 am with spasms of nerve endings being electrified from my spinal column where the virus is nesting.

I was a bit like one of those David Attenborough elephant seals, flopping around my bed and the floor trying to find some relief. I found some paracetamol - fat lot of good that did me - and continued to flop around until I found 3 hours of peace lying in the position that a Muslim man at prayer might find himself in if he fell asleep mid-worship.

I rang my uncle - my dear sweet uncle - who, because he was a GP once, must forever find himself dealing with frantic, panicking friends and relations like me hoping he can diagnose them down a phone line. After snotting quite a lot down my free.fr landline, I hung up, hoping it was muscular ache that, for some reason, was just nailing me to the floor. Oh yeah, to add insult to injury, I had to do a pregnancy test just to check it wasn't a baby growing in my fallopian tube causing the insane pain. Nope, nothing doing there....

I felt it was pathetic to be so in agony over muscular pain. I was far stronger than that, I thought, before the transplant. The operation and subsequent infections - injections - complications n' 'conflictions' have left me a weaker woman, there is no doubt about that.

So it was almost with glee that I noticed I had a rash on the right side of my back where the pain was. At first I thought it must be that I had a poisonous kidney infection bubbling to grow out of my body. But after googling 'back pain and rash three days later' I diagnosed myself with the old lady's plague - Shingles.

Shingles is a virus that hangs around in your spinal column from the days back when chicken pox arrived to join the pimples settled on the peaks of your cheekbones. Later in life, when your immune system is low (hello all transplant patients and elderly people) it comes out to get you. While I associated it with depression and bubbly spots, turns out it's god damned painful too. As though someone's injected your muscles with some stiffner, and, for good measure, has got hold of the corner threads of your muscles and is regularly twisting the end of them so they contort in pain.

My journey down to the hospital both yesterday for my scans/xrays and today to finally be diagnosed, I felt like the people sitting around me on the metro must think I had muscular dystrophy of some sort as I writhed around out of control. Makes sense, in fact, that they give you the same drugs that they hand out for epileptic fits. Shingles do give seizures as it turns out.

Anyway, another infection to add to the list. I'm really racking them up.

They say that every transplant patient's journey is different from the next. And the first person who said that to me said her journey had been a breeze. I am fast getting the feeling that mine is a bloody nightmare. Perhaps I should shut my mouth and let others, like me when I first heard that line, believe the transplant's a one stop shop for a permanent fix. Not that I'm saying I'm not eternally grateful, and that this life is a gazillion bambillion times better than dialysis. I guess I'm just allowing myself a little grumble. That's allowed isn't it?

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