I understood that the postherpetic neuralgia (source of the “pain in the face”) ended after a time, but that the longer from onset of herpes zoster till treatment began, the more nerve damage there was. The more nerve damage there was, the longer the healing time. Oh, yeah. And some people never got over the pain. I predicted I was one of the latter! I mean, I tend to attract the worst, the least common, the most unusual manifestations of what can go wrong with the human body!

By August of 2007, the continuing pain affected my ability to work. I left work early on some days because of pain attacks, and the frequency alarmed me, although it all fell within my allowed sick time. I had a total of five weeks vacation a year plus holidays by that stage of my work life, and often I used vacation time for sick days because the pain pretty well killed any possibility of long trips. I decided to see a pain specialist, a physiatrist.

The doctor had me lie down on an examination table and bring my knees up. The examination involved a mini-cattle prod (similar principle, lower level of electrical shock), needles stuck into nerves, and little jolts of electricity.

I joked with the doctor about how I hoped I wasn’t about to become a galvanic experiment where she’d trigger a nerve to make my legs dance or something rude and embarrassing. She laughed, and the testing was surprisingly mild and easy. She’d stick a needle in, trigger the nerve, and her laptop recorded the results. She did this on both sides of my face to establish the degree of damage to the right side nerves.

She prescribed Gabapentin, which evened out the pain to a dull roar. She also prescribed Cymbalta for nighttime use. Between them, I had control of the pain at last!

Control, at least, until I retired early (see “who I am” for details) and ran out of health insurance and prescription refills. Then it was back to pain, if not so severe. I mean, the last time I screamed out in pain and threatened to join the Evil One’s minions or God’s Warriors, depending on which gave me pain relief first, was 2007! (I was serious then, however, and suffered a brief lapse in faith. To Hell with the devil, too. He also failed me! Ha!)

The shingles left me completely deaf in my right ear because of scarring of the ear drum. I have a lovely scar from my ear to my eye brow, and another from the corner of my right eye down to my lip. There is another scar from my right ear to my lower lip, which pulls the center of the lip to the right to where the corner of my mouth used to be. It’s all very complex…and painful, the worst part of the pain in my face. The scar is tight, which exacerbates the pain.

The scars from herpes zoster don’t bother me, but the pain is wearing.

The tragus on my right ear was wasted away by the ear infection as well, though there seems to be no specific benefit to having one other aesthetics.