The fun that is getting the Shingles vaccine
After a friend described the horror that is having Shingles and then my doctor telling what it’s like to have it on your face, I was ready to get vaccinated. It’s two shots two months apart.
Side note: I want the job of naming diseases. How fun would that be coming up with names that, by themselves, clearly communicate how much you don’t want to get that disease. Shingles for example. It sounds like your going to have sandwich-sized pieces of skin falling off you. Chicken Pox, Mumps, Scarlet Fever, Ebola, not one of these sound like someone you’d invite to dinner.
About 8 hours after getting the first one, I wasn’t feeling very good. I just wanted to lay down and do nothing. The nurse said that if you have side effects from one of the shots, you don’t typically have them for the other so I thought I was in the clear. Well, I got the second one yesterday and 8 to 10 hours later I started shivering. I threw a blanket over me and just watched TV all evening. Then when it was time to go to bed, I pulled off the blanket and that’s when the fun began.
I clearly had a fever, my heart was racing and began shivering to a degree I have never experienced. My hands were shaking so badly that I was having trouble putting things down on my dresser. I almost threw my iPhone across the room. I got into bed and laid there under a blanket shivering, inch by inch exposing different parts of my body to the cool air which helped in the way that paint by numbers eventually produces an image from what appears seemingly to be nothing both on the canvas and in terms of one’s painting skills. It’s now 5AM and I haven’t really slept but the fever is almost entirely gone as are the shivers. Rather than feeling refreshed from 5 hours of lying down, I feel more like I just finished spending that time protecting my family with a long sword against 5 orcs. I’m almost certainly going to be too tired today to do much of anything so my schedule now consists of catching up on all the TV shows I’m watching, I did plan for this in both cases by getting the shots on a Friday.
As awful as it was (my doctor says I’m “exceedingly healthy” so I don’t have much personal experience being sick) I’m glad I did it. I won’t shock you with photos of people with Shingles but if you Google it, that will likely convince you. If it doesn’t, I can only say that pain must be something you enjoy. The vaccine is 90% effective according to the CDC and I’ll take those odds any time I can get them. Once you get Shingles the vaccine is no longer effective so you definitely don’t want to press your luck. Most of the people I know are in my approximate age orbit. With each passing year, you’re truly tempting fate.
If, like me, you had chicken pox as a kid, your odds of getting shingles are greater. If you haven’t had Shingles and are not yet vaccinated against it, I recommend you get it (the vaccine, not the disease) posthaste. You will also be helping to make the virus go extinct.