This is a note about travel and illness. Two things I try hard to keep separate.

Last week was the first full week of our annual Sierras roadtrip. It did not go according to plan. At first it seemed like several nights on a sleeping pad had tweaked my back. By the time we finished up in Coos Bay, I was sore and a dull pain started throbbing beneath my right rib. When we arrived in Lassen Volcanic National Park the throb transformed into a sharp and rhythmic pain.

I spent my time in the Park working from my van perched in position that would rather upset my physical therapist. When I wasn’t working, I practiced convincing myself that this was, in fact, a very normal and every day sort of stabbing pain. Nothing a good ignoring couldn’t fix. I, gracefully, declined to do much hiking while in the Park to give my beleaguered body time to heal from a surely treacherous but only mundanely strained back.

Wednesday we began the next leg of the trip with a four hour drive down to Tahoe. I was not much fun as far a road-trip co-pilots go.¹ I only survived through willpower drawn from knowing a real bed awaited me at its end. When we arrived I climbed in and allowed myself to feel optimistic. That night I took my partner out for dinner², both as a thank you for all the extra effort she was taking on for us and to (hopefully) mark a change in the tenor of the currently strained vibes of our trip. The meal was fantastic. I was certain that a night sleeping on a real bed would set things right. We popped on a movie and I took a muscle relaxer. (Some things can be left to fate, others require pharmaceutical intervention.)

Shortly after the movie finished, I woke up in the (confusing) throws of pain. The dull throbbing I had attributed to the spasms of my unhappy back muscles had transformed into a ceaseless stabbing pain that drove me to tears. I woke my partner and explained we might need to make the drive back to Portland tomorrow. (I did not want to die in California.) She, the love of my life, held my hand gently, offered kind words, and then popped in her ear plugs. Before rolling over, she explained, “if I’ve got to do the drive, I need to sleep and I can’t sleep through all your sniffling and moaning without these.”

Unlike her, I did not sleep much that night, though I did manage to experiment with every possible arrangement of pillows, furniture and abdominal placement in the vain pursuit of comfort.

The next morning, in the light of a new day, I decided I felt a bit better after all. Only a spot of muscular agony that’d be on its way out now that I was bundled in man’s greatest achievement—the king sized bed. I resolved to spend our Tahoe time recovering so that I could complete our planned backpacking trip that weekend. As a humble man, I met with my doctor over Zoom and accepted their prescription of a mild painkiller and muscle relaxer—a familiar cocktail that had helped me weather previous episodes of mundane and non-life threatening back pain. The day crawled on. The pain did not abate. My partner made a chili on a hot plate. I cried while watching cable TV, ever turning like a Sisyphean rotisserie chicken in pursuit of relief just beyond my grasp.

Consultations with Dr. Google had me doubting my original diagnosis. It turns out sharp pain under the right rib cage was a sure sign that a variety of (arguably vestigial but certainly conniving) organs might be preparing to explode and, subsequently, kill you. (Killing you seeming to be their modern, remaining purpose.) We watched movies. I anxiously tracked the dwindling window of open hours of the one urgent care clinic in town, knowing when it closed we’d have to make the long schlepp to the ER in Truckee. There I would have to eat the exorbitant cost of American emergency medicine for something I was equally sure was either a routine pulled muscle or my appendix trying to strangle the life from me.

Eventually I couldn’t take it anymore. Not the slow painful revolutions of ceiling, cable TV, bed. Nor the thought I might become one of those men who died, stubbornly, moments after saying something full of bravado and worthy of capture on a tombstone like, “it’s probably gas.” We made the drive to the clinic.

After waiting what, in retrospect, was a very short amount of time that only felt like an inhumanly cruel amount of time, I was seen a kind nurse who listened to my story (long and requiring help from my partner), checked my blood pressure (pretty good) and mercifully allowed me to lie down flat on the exam table (quite nice.) Before the doctor saw us they bravely sent in a second nurse. Some kind of pinch hitter whose mission was to prepare us for the reality of the situation. She explained it could be, in fact, a lot of different things inside me hellbent on rupture and my imminent death that were causing this pain. And, with heartfelt apologies, they lacked the imaging equipment that would identify the traitorous organ. I’d probably need to go to the ER in Truckee (ideally very soon) but the doctor would confirm. In her opinion it was an awful shame they didn’t, themselves, have this technology on hand. What with the expansion and all they could be, just about, a standalone ER themselves if they set to it.

I was saved from this fascinating deep dive on the economics of small tourist town medicine by the doctor.

Sadly, the doctor’s initial take wasn’t much more positive (though it made it up for it by not containing a large amount of unrelated exposition.) She listened to my experience and then dutifully poked parts of me to gauge my relative and proximal suffering with a practiced but medically dispassionate finger. That was followed by some grim nodding that confirmed, to me, my imminent and unfortunate demise.

As a matter of procedure she asked me to raise my shirt to check my abdomen (hairy but in my opinion otherwise unremarkable), took in my flank in an equally dispassionate manner, gave a appropriately doctorly “hm” and then proclaimed, “ah, it’s shingles.” Before me and my partner (herself having had shingles a few years back) could stop laughing I’d received a shot in the ass and a long list of prescriptions to dutifully retrieve from the lakeside CVS across the street.

I recovered another day with the aide of my warmest friend, opiates, and then we made the journey back home in two parts. First a sprint to Klamath Falls, OR where we celebrated another day’s victory over my viral enemy with gas station Indian food, before a final sprint back to Portland the next day closed (one hopes) the chapter on my shingles adventure.

I’m doing better, though the opiates have run out, and I’m taking this week off to recover. No organs, vestigial or otherwise, have managed to kill me. I’ve mostly spent my recovery watching movies to salve the bitterness of having my favorite trip of the year ruined. At least I did not die.

Things I Liked

From modern science, Hydrocodone

Being in pain really sucks. The opiate epidemic is worse. I’m glad we have a bit of a middle ground where I didn’t just have to take more Tylenol even if I find myself wishing they had prescribed me a little more than the handful they did.

From Merck, Zostavax the shingles vaccine

The shingles vaccine is only available in the US to folks above the age of 50. This is a goddamn travesty. Incidents of shingles in people under the age of 50 having been rising dramatically. Shingles sucks. Let people get the vaccine.