Shingles Experience

Few experiences absorb our attention the way illness does. Yet, when you talk about it with others, even close friends, their eyes soon grow glassy and begin to rove. How can something be of such pressing interest to us and of so little to others, I often wonder?

Despite awareness of this hazard, however, I write this week about a recent bout with shingles. This I do, not on my own initiative, but in response to a suggestion from my pastor, Dennis Sheehan. He urged me to share this experience with readers so as possibly to encourage others in coping with what can be a painful ordeal.

As a person of classical bent, I never feel myself in possession of a word’s meaning unless I know its roots. In this instance, the word “shingles” refers, not to the wooden boards that provide the exterior of some houses but rather to quite a different image.

When used to name the disease, “shingles” comes from the Latin word “cingulum,” that indicates a girdle across the middle of the body. Speakers of English in the Middle Ages with their fondness for variation apparently wore away the opening letter “c” in favor of the “sh” beginning the bizarre word that we know today.

The word describes the experience aptly because shingles sufferers usually feel themselves covered in a zone of pain that stretches part way across their body. Mine, however, has been located on my forehead, just above my left eye.

Though you do not need to have lived long to get shingles, age often brings it on. What most fascinates me about it is how this virus can have been lurking in our body since childhood. Its origin is the virus that causes chicken pox that so many of us had as kids but which may have lain dormant for decades. One member of my family got shingles in her 80s, some 70 or more years after the root disease first took hold in her body.

With this disease, our nerve ends become exposed, thus making us vulnerable to oftentimes excruciating pain. What causes the virus to erupt is still not clear, though medical authorities often point to stress. If that is the trigger, you can easily understand why shingles abounds in the general population.

If shingles carry a certain advantage, it may be the disease’s power to win sympathy. Most people know two things about it: first, it is usually very painful and second, it is not life-threatening.

That frees people to express condolences with the sufferer, a benefit I have been gathering in over the last several weeks. You can tell a person about being sorry for his trouble without worrying that your words might be inadequate. You know that the sufferer will get well.

For me, the illness has brought some other benefits as well. The most important of them for me is, once more, an acute sense of the kindness of strangers. In this instance, I mean mostly members of the medical staff at the clinic run by Harvard Vanguard.

In illness, you have to trust others to respond. My constant experience is that they do. You learn to practice a reliance on others that ultimately can enrich your own life.

Almost all people with whom I had no significant contact previously, these medical staffers have reached out to me in caring and sympathetic ways. This style of applying the healing arts has upped my morale and given me the confidence of finding relief from the disease’s effects.

That these caregivers are mostly women, some people of color, makes for a medical staff much different from what I knew earlier in life. Nurses, physicians, technicians, and others bring a diversity more representative of the world at large than in the past. I welcome the changes and believe us improved by the special gifts that women bring to the healing ministry.

Entrusting myself to the care they offer brings me to face my own dependence. Contrary to the great American cultural myth that we don’t need anyone, we all depend on one another. As a lady once told the author Mary Pipher, “Honey, life ain’t nothing but strings.”

Though not life-threatening, shingles has brought me further experience of my own mysterious vulnerabilities. How complicated we continue to be, defying all simplifications of human life!

Even at the most painful times, I try to ward off the unlovely emotion of self-pity. The heroic examples of friends who are engaged in long-term struggles with death-bringing diseases such as cancer shame me into placing limits on my own narcissism.

More positively, shingles speaks to me of the value in each day. Feeling unwelcome pain on some days enhances the joy of living on other days.

In this connection, I never tire of quoting Rabbi Abraham Joseph Heschel because his sentiments reinforce my continuing experience of life: “Just to be is a blessing; just to live is holy.”

Richard Griffin