Not feeling like myself

Last Thursday I decided to take a long walk home after work, taking in the season’s cool air. I thought I would feel better after a hectic day and a headache earlier in the week. I didn’t. I woke up the next day with chills and my skin felt strangely sensitive. I had shooting pains across my body. I blamed it on yoga. Over the next two days, painful red marks appeared under my right eye and the side of my face. I wondered if something had bitten me in my sleep. Yesterday, the red marks were still painful. I called my doctor and had an appointment in the afternoon. My intuition (and self diagnosis ) was right, I have shingles.

Luckily the rash was in its early stages. She asked if I'd been under a prolonged stressed since shingles and stress are often linked. I laughed. Even though it is more likely to affect older adults, I found out that women are more prone to developing shingles than men, particularly during perimenopause, because of hormonal changes to their immune response. Noone talked to me about perimenopause in my younger years although it happens to half of the population of the earth. Peri is the time leading up to it—for me, perimenopause seems worse than when the period finally ends in menopause. I began to wonder if the phrase “not feeling like myself” may actually be a reliable clinical way to describe what this time of my life has felt like in recent years. I have read that considering doctors in most medical schools receive only one hour of instruction on menopause on average, this information gap, unfortunately, adds up. As much as I feel good about life I am in this phase where my body and mind is constantly changing in new ways. There is a wide range of symptoms and many more unknown. If you don’t know what they are though, you cannot connect them to what’s happening to you. I’ve been open about these changes with family and friends, but I sometimes feel embarrassed —something that seems out of character to me. On the contrary, I have often gotten less embarrassed as I get older, but it is more that I get less embarrassed through experience than age. The risk of getting shingles increases as you get older so that is very true.  

The doctor prescribed antiviral medication and recommended I "try to avoid unnecessary stress." They say stress can be the kiss of death or the spice of life. So, the issue, really, is how to manage it. Going out for a run never made my stress disappear, but it reduced some of the emotional intensity that I had been feeling, clearing my thoughts. Today, my diagnosis became excruciatingly clear, but the rash has been manageable. You might assume that the rash is the bad part since it's the most visible. The burning sensation is terrifying because of the nerves affected by the virus, but the most daunting is that once you get shingles, you're at higher risk for recurrences. Sigh. I know that shingles can come on randomly —that it probably wasn't my lifestyle or some underlying condition, but it has made me think more about this transitory time in my life. And for those experiencing the weight of symptoms, though, there’s hope. Researchers have found that symptoms like brain fog and anxiety are not likely to last, and all menopausal women I know have said how wonderful it is not to have their period anymore. So there’s that.