A Broken Wing

So as it turns out, for the last week or so, I have had shingles. It is essentially a re occurrence of the chickenpox, which I had when I was little, and is related to stress, fatigue, or pretty much anything that takes the immune system down a peg or two.

It is a small flaming patch of pain. It hurts all the time. It doesn't itch exactly, it tingles, like the pins and needles of something falling asleep, and the reason it tingles is because the nerve endings of the affected skin are slowly being eaten and dissolved. It leaves little pock marks, just like its predecessor, and the redness fades, and the skin will eventually be mostly unblemished.

But it is numb.

There is some sensation there, but I have lost the fine tuning over a patch of skin the width of my hand, and about three hand lengths across, starting just underneath my nipple in a widening band heading back towards my spine. The doctor says the damage is permanent, and it will never feel the same again.

The parts that still hurt are slowly pulling the muscles in my shoulder and back out of alignment, and I am now in pretty much constant, screaming pain from the top of my shoulder to my waist. It feels like an angry painting of jagged spikes, dark and dripping with malignance, and the only comfort I have is that at least I am still feeling something around the edges, which is why my body is reacting in this way.

This is probably no big deal to a lot of people. I feel silly even trying to relate just how emotional I am about this. But my skin, my ability to feel and perceive through it is like a second sight, capable of recognizing thousands of shades of sensations and pressures. I know where all my nerves are, like I named them, like they are my children, and I can feel them dying one by one.

Imagine if you woke up and realized that you had just lost 7% of your eyesight, and there was nothing anyone could do to get it back.

Everything feels different. Shivers, music that makes your hairs stand up wash normally over one side of me, and either flare in pain or simply vanish on the other. I look at something beautiful, something stirring, and I can feel the heat wash up in part of me, and nothing, I feel nothing in this great, ragged hole. I used to delight in in the sensation of swimming in my own thoughts, of feeling my emotions ripple over my skin, cascading over every bump and hair. Now it is off center, uneven, ugly and incomplete. A great scar, twisting invisibly over every thought and my most intimate and personal of feelings.

I feel disfigured by it, I feel assaulted by it, and there is nothing I can do to change it. It is hard to express my rage and sorrow at the loss. For the rest of my life, that part of me will have a hearing impairment within the language of sensation. It's my mother tongue, and the one I prefer using whenever I can. I'm not entirely sure what it will mean for me in the future, I suppose I will make do with whatever I have left.