41 Narrative Ethnography

Shingles in Buenos Aires

I woke up in my small Buenos Aires apartment like any other morning. I stared at the ceiling and yawned as my boyfriend Jaime snored softly next to me. I rolled over to get up and was met with an unbelievable painful sensation I had never felt before. What the fuck?! I thought to myself as I struggled to get up. Hot stabbing pain flooded my body as I tried to move myself into an upright position. Jaime, alert and wide-eyed, scrambled to help me. My yelps of surprised agony woke him up. It probably took 10 minutes to get from my bed to the kitchen table. I’ve gotta get to a doctor. What the hell is happening? was the only thing running through my head.

The previous night I had started to feel a bit under the weather, but this didn’t feel like any other illness I’d had. It was my junior year of college and I was wrapping up my semester abroad in Argentina— I was set to fly home in just a few weeks. First semester of my freshman year I was sent home for nearly a month, bedridden from an intense bout of mono, but this was completely different. I studied in Ecuador the semester prior, where I first met Jaime, and the worst I had felt during my time there was a god awful bout of food poisoning. Again, very different from whatever was happening to my body this morning.

“Necesitamos ir al doctor,” Jaime said firmly as he quickly got dressed and grabbed my shoes. He helped me hobble out of the apartment, but I found moving to be a little bit easier once I was on my feet. The pain had slightly started to subside but I still thought to myself, thank god we have a working elevator. Out on the street, I picked up the closest payphone to call my program staff about where I should go, and Jaime waved us down a cab. Before I knew it, we were entering a giant hospital complex, and he helped explain what was happening to the front desk as I refocused my breathing. Getting out of the cab had sent new shocks of searing pain down my back, but I was getting used to its hot feeling. I didn’t wait more than what felt like 5 minutes before being taken back to an exam room. The doctor  immediately started asking me a million questions and seemed quite puzzled by what could be causing my agonizing pain. The only other visible symptom I had was a small bumpy rash on my back; it looked like a mild allergic reaction to a detergent. After a bodily exam, he swabbed this rash and then later came back with results: I have a virus. He writes me a prescription for an antiviral and some painkillers and finally my mind is able to slow down. Wait wait, what exact virus do I have? Our entire visit has been in Spanish, but at this point he attempts to tell me in English, “I think you have the measles.” I assure him that no, that’s not possible. “No, the mumps,” he corrects himself. Again I tell him no, that’s probably not it because I’ve been vaccinated. He furrows his brow, thinking for a minute before eagerly declaring,“No, no, tienes los shingles!”

Shingles?What the hell? I thought only old people got shingles! I was barely 21 years old. He handed me the paper with my prescription, telling me I could fill it just down the hall, and explained that my pain was actually nerve damage from “the Herpes Zoster.” It wasn’t until after I had checked out that I was able to really process the diagnosis I’d just received. I found the nearest payphone to call my parents. They couldn’t believe the news but were happy to hear I had been seen so quickly. My dad’s comforting tone stopped my anxious thoughts from bubbling up. He calmly instructed me, “just take your medicine and manage the pain until you get home. Oh, and give Honsey a call to see if he has any advice.” As soon as I hung up I called Dr. Honsey, our family friend and, conveniently, general practitioner. His son has been a classmate and friend of mine since grade school, so we’ve had a close relationship for as long as I can remember. He reassured me that I did everything right, that I’d get better with this medicine and some time, and then proceeded to poke fun at me for being so young and having shingles. Even though I didn’t have a bad experience at the hospital, it felt so comforting to have such reassurance from voices I knew so well.

I watched Jaime smoke a cigarette across the street, waiting for me to finish up my phone calls. “Wait, Honsey, before you go, what causes shingles? How did I get it?” I implored. “Well, you had chickenpox as a kid,” he told me, “and once it’s in your system it can flare up again, usually if your immune system is weakened. Have you been sick recently?” I told him no, but reminded him of my mono episode freshman year. “Well, then, have you been feeling stressed lately?” I let out a little chuckle, “Why, yes. When am I not?” He chided me, and we agreed that stress was likely the reason for my outbreak. What I didn’t tell him was that I’d been seeing a couples therapist (entirely in Spanish, I might add) for the last few months, in an attempt to deal with all the arguments Jaime and I had, usually stemming from his very sexist and very machismo beliefs. I’d always suffered from mild anxiety, but this had been heightened after experiencing a sexual assault in high school; I found that the stress of being on high alert seemed to creep in on the relationships I’d had in the years after. I guess, on the bright side, my Spanish improved incredibly during the months I spent with Jaime: during my doctor’s visit I had absolutely no worries about language or language barriers. I looked at him across the street, and shook my head. Some relationships are really not worth it. We broke up not long after I returned home.

While Dr. Honsey was right, I did indeed get better, the nerve damage that had caused such excruciating pain took almost two years to fully get rid of. The painkillers I got prescribed definitely helped while the antiviral drugs sped up the healing process, but in the months after I still experienced occasional waves of hot pain throughout my body. It wasn’t until I was living in Chicago, post grad, that I found an acupuncturist who finally got rid of the pain for good. The whole ordeal really just emphasized how accessible socialized medicine can be— as a broke college student who was very much aware and worried about finances at the time, I remember having no concerns about paying my bill whatsoever. The total ended up being a fraction of what an ER visit in the states would have cost me. If nothing else, this experience was an invaluable lesson on just how deeply stress and anxiety can affect me physically.