Quote:
Originally Posted by hobbes9324
In passing, shingles is miserable - very painful and if you have involvement of the nerve that serves your eye can lead to badness up to and including blindness.
This was what I had (I believe it was the trigeminal nerve, if that's the same nerve).
First symptom was a minor eye ache. Figured it was just a thing that would go away. The next day, it got really bad. At random intervals - could be every few seconds, could be every few minutes - it felt like someone was stabbing me in the back of the eye with a ball point pen. Stopped me in my tracks every time it happened.
The pain got worse. My wife took me to the eye doctor, as I couldn't drive because of it. No sores had developed yet, so he didn't diagnose shingles. It worsened over the next day or two, so I went back. I had one small sore that had appeared on my nose and the nurse/technician immediately knew what it was. Was given medication to try to help the pain (went to my primary care doc, too), but nothing helped.
Within another day or two, the right side of my face and head exploded with sores and swollen welts. I looked like the Toxic Avenger. For four days, I slept about an hour a day. My eye didn't hurt anymore, but I had a pounding headache non-stop, couldn't make it go away. It was the one time in my life I understood how people could be in so much pain that they wanted to die. I knew it would end, so obviously I didn't want to die, but it was that bad. Worst I have ever felt in my life.
After those four days, I could finally function a bit, meaning I could stand up and walk around the house a little. All told, it was about four weeks before I felt well enough to get on with my life.
One weird symptom was that it actually hurt to just lightly touch my hair. When I finally felt up to taking a shower, it was painful. Literally just touching a finger to my hair stung.
Looking back at my photos (I took some to show my parents), it was fall 2010, so I was only 34 years old. The scar on my cornea was I guess the result of a small sore on/in my eye or something. It was so small that it wasn't noticed in a follow-up appointment, I think, and ended up growing over a few years. One day I noticed my vision was kind of ****ed up and I could actually see the scar when I looked in the mirror. Fortunately, it's under control as long as the eye drop works. My vision will never be perfect even with glasses, though (if it stays as is, it's fine).