I Got Shingles Even Though I’m Vaccinated

My experience proves that vaccines work.

I’ll spare you the reality. (Photo by Carissa Weiser on Unsplash)

My mom got shingles back before the introduction of the first vaccine, Zostavax, in 2006.

She said it was the worst pain she’d ever experienced. She had it on her scalp and on her lower back — big patches of red, scabby, itchy, burning skin.

She had no way to lie down comfortably and it lasted for weeks. A deep, relentless pain she just had to endure.

If you’ve ever had chicken pox, the shingles virus — another fun member of the herpes family — really is living inside of you, just like the ads say. So when my time came (the wrong side of 50) I immediately got vaccinated.

Like a moron, I thought this made me 100% safe from shingles.

Dear reader, vaccines do not make you 100% safe, from anything. Lifelong hypochondriac that I am, you’d think I’d know that. But somehow I thought shingles was (were?) different.

By the way, if you Google “shingles”, ignore results like “How To Get Algae Off Your Shingles” and “How Often Should You Replace Shingles?”, as these results are not relevant. Unless you need your roof replaced.

The “algae” one had me briefly concerned.

In my relentless search for answers to questions like “Is shingles deadly?” and “What deadly diseases can be mistaken for shingles?” and “Can you die suddenly without warning from shingles?”, I also discovered that shingles can be internal, a fact I have chosen to obliterate from my memory.

Internal shingles are, in fact, deadly.

Great.

I woke up Thursday morning with an itchy spot on the upper back of my right thigh. I apparently bypassed the prodromal stage and went straight to the blistering rash stage.

Yay, me!

The rash is about the size of a half dollar and it hasn’t spread. I’m not in agony, I can sleep, I can lie down.

In my opinion, this is because I got the shingles vaccine.

So to all of the anti-vaxxers who say, “Well, vaccines clearly don’t work because I still got the flu, or COVID, or rabies,” or whatever, YES, you got vaccinated and you still got the flu, or you got COVID.

But you weren’t hospitalized. You survived.

Because you got vaccinated.

I went to Urgent Care on Saturday even though I knew (thanks to Dr. Google) that I was probably outside of the 72-hour window for antivirals to do any good.

But the patch was looking a little gruesome and I wanted confirmation that it was, indeed, shingles, and not, say, Bubonic plague, or the Marburg virus, or avian flu.

The 15-year-old physician’s assistant agreed, after glancing at the spot for about 10 seconds, that it was probably shingles. I also had a slight fever, which helped in the diagnosis.

He offered me shorts to put on for decency, but I said *already pulling down my pants*, “I’m basically a professional patient. I don’t care who sees me naked.”

What I didn’t say was, “Son, this is the profession you chose. Behold my butt!”

Plus there was a small child in the next room who sounded like it had TB. I wanted out of there as soon as humanly possible.

I filled the Valtrex prescription and gave it a shot, but it made me feel approximately 1000 times worse than the rash. Plus it’s a nephrotoxin — seriously, I need to stay off the internet.

So now I’m just dabbing Calamine on the spot and watching for sepsis, blood poisoning, gangrene. Things like that.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll have avian flu. But not today.

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