Hooray, and congratulations, as you absolutely did not merely flop yourself into the care of expert medical folk; you did this, with expert medical care and support.
That “this” at the end of that last sentence is something crucial to the well-being of us no longer youngsters. Staying happily healthy is a big task past 60 or so. My own body and my doctors both inform me that my decades long struggle with shingles, caused by the chicken pox virus herpes-varicella-zoster, has finally ended in victory for me. I have been deleriously happy over the last four weeks as I have returned to running, skiing, surfing, as well as stretching and weightlifting. I have been very sore muscularly as a result, and what joy it is to feel that sensation again after years of being unable to “push it”.
Almost everyone can prevent shingles by getting the Shingrix vaccine, but not me. If you have not done so, I strongly urge you to do so,
I got my first shingles attack when I was only 8, and the attacks continued ever after, worsening as adolescence set in. My mystic granny brilliantly took me aside and gave me training in meditation and meditative mind practices to ignore/accept the pain and discomfort “because it is just mean virus bugs messing with your nerves.” As I aged the attacks brought not only pain (which I could always surmount, often to finish climbing a peak or….) but also severe incapacitating exhaustion. I could no longer go deep into the mountains, or crew on racing sailboats, without putting myself or others at risk.
I also noticed that attacks seemed to be hitting not only my skin but my intestines and possibly other organs. During attacks my digestive system developed symptoms my Mexican doctor described as “not diarhea not constipation but stuttering guts. Miserable.
After getting vaccinated with Shingrix (two shots) with great hope in 2017, the shingles attacks came back after only three months. After some research and multiple consultation with experts i undertook a counterattack in 2022 with a series of three Shingrix shots closely packed together over five weeks, and then a years long program of focusing my immune system as entirely on shingles as I could, beginning with using multiple anti-fungals to destroy toe, foot, and crevice fungi, going insane with separation and masking in cold/flu season, using my anti-HIV medicines with meticulous timing to get maximum suppression of the HIV virus, and meantime
- treating myself like tuberculosis patients in sanatoriums in 1900, with freakish attention on staying rested, very nutririously fed, vitamined, and mineraled, carefully calibrated exercise (no running nor any of my favorite athletic activities), and daily yoga and meditation.
- intentionally “pushing” into activity after any month or more with no outbreaks nor the exhaustion that almost always led into outbreaks, basically intentionally provoking an attack when I had reason to believe my immune system had the best chance of successfully focusing only on the herpes zoster virus.
- If an attack came I hit it hard and briefly with big dose of the useful but never sufficient anti-viral drug acyclovir (in the more potent form valacyclovir), to end the attack as quickly as possible… Over the past three years, at first slowly then more rapidly and definitively, the attacks became further and further separated in time and weaker. Then they stopped.
My body is now gloriously improving, and last week (escorted by nephews) I was doing black diamond skiing and losing my mind with joy.
Never say die, until it is really ttime to say die….
