AM850.com

You can’t turn on television or listen to radio these days without being bombarded by pharmaceutical advertising. I don’t want to be another voice in this electronic onslaught, but I will suggest that a lot of listeners to this program consider getting a shingles vaccine that has been on the market since 2006.

Last week, the Centers for Disease Control recommended this vaccine for everyone 60 years of age or older. I emphasize that no one should consider getting the vaccine without careful consultation with his or her family doctor.

If you are like I was two months ago, you have probably never heard of shingles, or considered that it might affect your life adversely. Shingles is very rarely life- threatening. It’s a virus associated with chickenpox, which most of us have had as children. We recover quickly from this childhood disease, usually, but the virus remains in the nerve-endings of our body for the rest of our lives. No one knows what makes this virus take a second bite of the apple, mostly in the elderly. You cannot catch it from anyone, unless you have never had chickenpox, and even this form of contagion is rare. But 50 percent of the people who have had chickenpox will, at some point in their lives, get shingles. It looks like a rash, lined up in even blotches, hence the name shingles. It can be quite sensitive and painful. Eighty percent of the people who get this ailment get over it in about two weeks.

But twenty percent of the others have post-herpetic neuralgia. It can take months, and sometimes even years to get over this vicious form of the disease. I am sorry to say that I am among that twenty percent. Two months ago, the welts began in my mouth, spread to the right side of my face and blistered. But once the blisters disappeared, the problems began in earnest. The right side of my face was so sensitive I could not shave without agony for weeks. The muscles on the right side of my face, including my right eye, would not work. I could not blink. My right ear was and is very sensitive to the touch, outside and inside.

I am now going into the third month as a victim of a very vicious form of shingles called Ramsay Hunt Syndrome. I look normal once again, can blink and see normally, and can shave without too much trauma. But I still have a dull pain in my right jaw to my right ear throughout the day and night. This is partially controlled by a few Tylenol each morning and late afternoon. But the pain is always there. And this disease, which I had hardly heard of before, I now discover has affected about half my friends over the years.

I urge you, if you are sixty years old or older, to take the advice of the Centers for Disease Control. See or call your doctor. Take advantage of this shot that is now on the market. If your insurance does not cover it, it will cost you from $160 to $200. It will be the best money you have ever spent.

This is Radio Ralph with a comment at midweek for AM850.