So, my mum swears blind I had chicken pox when I was little, and that all three of us kids had it one after another. This gives you lifelong immunity right?
Hence I was quite happy to be looking after my two boys over the last few weeks as they suffered through it. So when I started feeling rotten on Friday I thought I’d just got a cold… it was just weird that I had this spot on my neck… Then Saturday morning – boom. A brace of spots. And they’ve just spread like crazy since then.
The weekend was, well, awful, terrible flu symptoms, stabbing pains, and nausea. I’m a bit better today but the spots are still multiplying, including in some very personal places indeed. And at random they will start producing these horrible stabbing pains, especially if you knock one of them. It’s the nerve ganglions protesting at the damage being inflected by the herpes virus. (Chicken pox is a variant of the herpes virus – there seem to be plenty of them – and the virus tends to attach itself to the nerves, which is why the grown up version of chicken pox is, usually, shingles, which I had last year in my eye and is awful).
Anyway, I went to see the doc this morning and he said, yes, you’ve got chicken pox, and yes, you can get it twice, even though most doctors don’t like to admit it. Which is a pain, because I have to stay in all week, which means a) missing Mala on Tuesday in Sheffield, which is of course going to be fantastic, and b) missing a business trip to New York.
On the other hand, my hosting company has managed to fix a few issues, which means that wordpress is running a lot more smoothly now, so blogging is a whole lot easier… as you may have noticed from the flurry of posts today. So there may be a mini-avalanche of posts this week… if the sores on my hands don’t get any worse, and stop weeping so much my fingers slip off the keyboard…