MCL and Me

Just a quick shingles situation report. I went to the clinic on Wednesday 18th August and saw the registrar. He had a quick look at the shingles and confirmed the outbreak appears to be over as the lesions have crusted over and started to fade in places. He told me to keep taking the gabapentine for four weeks for the nerve pain. He also reduced my ciclosporin to 10mg twice a day. Assuming we continue the taper as it has been at 10mg per visit then when I next attend clinic on 6th October I should be stopping ciclosporin altogether. ( I hope we don't go down to 5mg not least because that will be really fiddly to measure the liquid in my syringe. ) I was signed off work until 30th August ( though it will be 31st when I can actually go back to work as Monday 30th is a Bank Holiday). The pain from the shingles has been quite intense at times over the last week and I've had to take some co-codamol painkillers between gabapentine doses to help relieve it. Over the last couple of day...

.....is not bold? Ok not a great tag line but my internal sub-editor couldn't resist the alliteration. Oh I should say that this post is rated Potentially Gruesome for pictures of shingles. This time last week I was blogging about my admittance to hospital with shingles. Well for those of you who have not heard by other means such as Twitter, Facebook or the Intermom (that special network of mothers that disseminates information between sons, daughters and the friends thereof far faster then the World Wide Web) I was released from hospital on Monday 9th August which was ahead of the schedule I had initially been told. The reasoning was that we had caught the outbreak early I had had seventy-two hours of intravenous aciclovir and no new lesions had appeared anywhere for forty-eight hours. I was sent home around 14:00 with some gabapentine nerve pain tablets and a ten day course of valaciclovir tablets, which are a form of aciclovir that produce higher levels of the drug in the bloo...

The answer is when it is shingles. I'm writing this blog post from Ward West 5 of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital having been admitted yesterday. It started on Wednesday afternoon, 4th August when I felt an ache in my upper back just below the shoulder blade. Having just worked two eighteen hour days doing a disaster recovery for work, I put it down to having spent too much time sitting in front of a computer screen with my far from perfect posture. The pain persisted throughout Wednesday and Thursday but co-codamol pain killers kept it at bay and I was able to work in the office as normal. I logged on from home on Friday morning as per my usual routine. I started to get a tender sort of burning sensation under the skin in a band around my abdomen and back on the right hand side but it wasn't until there were some spot/lesions on the side of my abdomen where the tenderness and burning was that I made the connection and realised it could be shingles. I tried ringing my GP for an a...