This notes comes belatedly for a couple reasons. Last week was the first (full) week of our annual Sierras roadtrip. Things did not go quite according to plan. At first it seemed like my sleeping pad had triggered some old back issues. A dull pain that started during our time in Coos Bay quickly became a throbbing, sharp twinge while in Lassen Volcanic National Park. This twinge got worse, seemingly exacerbated by my days spent working out of my van.

I was committed to pushing through, though declined to do much hiking while in the Park to try and give my body time to heal from what I thought was only a sore or pulled back muscles. On Wednesday, we started our drive down to our next stop, Tahoe City, and that’s when things started to take a turn. I could barely stand the 4ish hour ride and found I couldn’t manage my portion of the driving. My partner had to take the wheel and we listened to podcasts the whole way to make up for my acute lack of conversational skill.¹

Once we got there and I had some time to lay down and stretch I was feeling more optimistic. I even took us out for a nice dinner at Christy Hill², 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. When we got back to our room for the night 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 determined to put a finger on the scale of good fortune.

About an hour after falling asleep 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 sharp, repetitive stabbing pain that left me in tears. I woke my partner and told her we might need to make the drive back to Portland tomorrow. She held my hand, offered kind words, and then popped in her ear plugs. She solemnly let me know that if she were to be able to do the drive she’d need these so she could sleep through my sniffling and moaning.

I did not sleep much that night, though I did manage to experiment (unsuccessfully) with every possible arrangement of pillows, furniture and abdominal placement to try and find comfort.

The next day I determined, in the light of a day, I felt a bit better and convinced myself once again that my pain was muscular in nature. We resolved to spend our Tahoe time resting and recovering so that I could complete the planned backpacking trip that weekend and hiking the week to come. I did a Zoom appointment with a doctor who prescribed me a mild painkiller and a muscle relaxer—the cocktail that had seen me through my previous back problems. As the day went on it was clear these weren’t doing the trick.

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) 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 just a pulled muscle or my appendix trying to strangle the life from me.

Eventually I couldn’t take it anymore and did not want to become one of those men who died, stubbornly, moments after saying something full of bravado and worth of capture on a tombstone like, “it’s probably gas.” We made the brief drive to the clinic where I spent much of few minute journey cursing the nearly 30 year-old suspension in my van as each minor variation in the road sent me into the Lament Configuration-inspired deliriums of pain.

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 another nurse whose mission was to gently 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 my pain. Sadly, 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.

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 significant amount of unrelated side story.) 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 a cursory and 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 recover at the CVS across the street.

I recovered another day with the aide of my charming 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.