Shingles rash location: coincidence or conspiracy?

Post date: 2018-09-20 17:06:45

I just got back from the ER tonight where the doctor took one look at the large rash on the left side of my neck and said, "You poor thing. You have shingles." Got my meds, got my treatment plan, got a question about why my main rash is on a previously insulted area of my neck.

I've been really stressed and on killer deadlines that have ramped up over the past month, so it's no shock that I got a bad cold just before Labour Day weekend. The usual sneezing and congestion faded after several days, but my cough lingered much longer.

Last Monday, I got into such a hard coughing fit that my full chest and shoulder area felt electrified, but not actually painful, for about 30 seconds. After that feeling faded, various parts of the left side of my neck and the left deltoid/shoulder area immediately started to complain, and the complaints lasted for several days. I would get a phantom sunburn feeling that migrated around my neck and shoulder, and I felt various types of noticeable but not dire pain at various areas: dull, throbbing, stabbing.

So I obviously pinched a C-whatever nerve in a spectacular way in that coughing fit, but I was too busy to go get a doctor to agree with me, so I just waited for it to heal itself.

Last Thursday I noticed what seemed to be a set of hives on my neck, at a location where I often felt that pinched nerve burning or pain. The hives didn't seem painful, but they were on an intermittently painful spot. But while the pinched nerve pain seemed to level off over the past few days, it started getting bad again this Monday: stabbing and throbbing, but not burning -- and always at one point now: that set of "hives".

Uh-oh. Finally clued in. Cut to the sympathetic ER doctor and a quick trip to the Parkdale Shoppers Drug Mart.

But I'm still wondering: is it just coincidence that my Thursday rash presented itself in one of the areas of my neck that reacted most strongly to the Monday pinched nerve, or did this pinched/injured nerve provide a good place to let the virus "leak" so that I got the shingles rash and associated stabbiness in one of the areas affected by the pinched nerve?

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