I Got Shingles As A Healthy 34-Year-Old, And It Was The Worst Pain I've Ever Felt

By Amanda MacMillan A few weeks after my 34th birthday, my husband and I went for a Saturday hike — a weekly ritual we’d started after moving to New York State’s Catskill Mountains region a few months earlier. I’d been feeling a bit under the weather, and I hoped the fresh autumn air would do me good. It didn’t. Later that night, I had chills and my skin felt strangely sensitive, like when you’re coming down with the flu. On top of that, it felt like I had pulled a muscle in my back or chest; when I breathed or stretched certain ways, I’d get shooting pains across my body. I blamed it on yoga.  Over the next two days, my body continued betraying me in weird ways. Painful red marks appeared under my armpit and my lower back; at first I chalked it up to the new sports bra I’d worn on my hike, but when they started growing in both size and pain, I wondered if a spider had bitten me in my sleep. When I tried foam-rolling away the strange muscular achiness in my back and chest, I swear I almost passed out — my back felt like it was on fire. At this point, I was marveling at my dumb luck: Who pulls a muscle, gets the flu, and gets attacked by bugs (or a really terrible sports bra) all in the same few days? Tuesday — which happened to be Election Day 2016 — I woke up feeling no better, so my husband suggested that I should call a doctor. “You want to make sure you don’t have, like, shingles or so...
Source: Healthy Living - The Huffington Post - Category: Consumer Health News Source Type: news