Rachel is a Jewish bisexual autistic woman (she/her) with ADHD in her twenties. She loves writing and can always be found with her nose in a book! Her plan for the future is to earn her Psy. D. in clinical psychology. This interested in psychology started as a way to help her understand people better and to figure out what it was about others I kept not getting. It is also something deeply linked with her self-advocacy. There is a gap in communication between the autistic community and providers, and she want to help bridge it and challenge others to see things from different perspectives.
View all postsWhen Shingles Strikes; The Aftereffects of Illness
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In mid-august, when I had a splitting headache after work I didn’t think much of it. I had been trudging around Philly on a hot summer day. I figured I might have dehydrated myself, even with the water bottle I brought along. While the headache was bad enough for me to lay down, hands palming my eyes as I waited for it to end, it eventually subsided later that evening. I figured that was that.
When I kept getting headaches that weekend, I didn’t know what to make of it. I worried it could be something concerning, but the pain wasn’t so debilitating, and it wasn’t like there was much I could do until Monday. If I was also beset with painfully irritated forehead acne, it was easy to see that as an unfortunate coincidence. Maybe the stress of such a bad headache had brought it on.
When I noticed said acne seemed to be forming in some sort of island chain leading up into my hairline, even that was easy to write off as merely strange.
None of it was so easy to ignore, however, come Monday evening. That was when I looked in the bathroom mirror and realized in the space of a few hours my latest acne breakout had rapidly expanded and was now well on its way to terraforming a good quarter of my face.
My dad, ever the worrier, insisted I go to urgent care. My mom volunteered to drive me, even though she hadn’t even had dinner yet (this, I know, shows how much she loves me).
I wasn’t sure what to expect at urgent care. The mutant breakout on my face almost looked like an allergic reaction, but I’d never had any allergies quite like that. My mom did throw out shingles on the car ride there, but I’d been vaccinated for chickenpox as a child, and as far as anyone knew I’d never had it.
Yet, despite all that, shingles it was. An infection they don’t even vaccinate people for until they’re 50. My doctor would later explain that I must have had a mild version of chickenpox when I was very young, possibly confined to a single rash somewhere on my body. That was of little help to me now.
What worried me the most in those early days of my diagnosis was the fact that the rash was so close to my eye. I learned quickly that a shingles infection in an eye can cause vision loss up to total blindness. The urgent care doctor sternly telling me not to touch my eyes, in a tone that suggested my life depended on it, did not ease any fears.
I admit, I did a bit of catastrophic thinking. I paced in the middle of the night, earnestly contemplating a future of vision loss and terrifying my father further in the process. It didn’t help that my eyes were stinging to hell and back. Several trips to the eye doctor would reveal this was nothing but some dryness. Even when my right eye swelled up to the point of being almost shut, the infection itself managed to miss my eye. This, at least, was a relief to the worst of my stress around my current condition.
But I still had to weather the shingles storm. I was prescribed medication for 10 days, so I hoped that meant the infection would run its course after that time. I was eager to see this put behind me. Not just because I felt miserable, but because I hated having to justify taking so much time off work when I had a family vacation only a scant two months away.
Yet, even as my health did improve, progress turned out to be much slower than I would have hoped. It seemed like every time I thought I was recovered, I would end up pushing myself too hard and feeling worse again. As much as being sick sucked, part of me feels that the forward and back march of health was the hardest part to deal with.
I didn’t feel like I truly had the time to recover at my own pace. I was always aware of all the stuff waiting for me to do once I was better. It hung over me, stressing me out and making it hard to focus on resting. I worried about how this would impact things like my attempts at networking or other career opportunities. The whole world doesn’t stop for you just because you need rest.
I think I burned myself out, struggling with both the infection and the stress it was causing me. And there’s nothing worse than feeling burned out while also feeling like you’ve done nothing at all. If I’m going to burn out, I could at least have something to show for it.
Even worse, I soon realized how much the infection had disrupted my routine and the consequences of that. I stopped adhering to basically every routine I had managed to cobble together for myself, and the setback this caused for any developing habits can’t be understated.
Ever since then, even to this day, I’ve struggled to gain a better foothold on productivity again. Maintaining day-to-day productivity is often something I’ve struggled with, but since the shingles, I feel like I’ve been at my worst.
It’s disheartening, sometimes going days feeling like I’ve barely accomplished anything. Staring at unchecked to-do lists with growing resentment for myself as I watch the tasks pile up. All of it only makes me feel worse, creating a destructive cycle I know I must stop.
But stopping it requires something incredibly hard; forgiving myself. It’s a challenge. I feel such anger, such self-hatred over all the opportunities I’ve missed. Over all the people I have let down. Yet if I can’t forgive myself then this self-hatred will only continue to pile on. It will crush me.
Some days I have been doing better than others. Both in showing myself forgiveness and in reclaiming a bit of healthy productivity. These stops and starts aren’t easy. Sometimes the urge to wallow in the helplessness I feel is immense. In the end though, I have no choice but to take things one day at a time.
Doing my best doesn’t always look like doing my best, not even to myself. Regardless, there is nothing I can do except my best. Even when my best doesn’t look how I want it to. I will continue to try to show myself kindness. If I can do that now, then maybe I can learn to make my best even better. I cannot do it the other way around. I cannot withhold kindness from myself until I prove myself worthy of it. Don’t withhold kindness from yourself either.