Stress-Induced Shingles: How The 'Dragon In My Ribcage' Led To A Painful And Unexpected Diag

“There is a dragon living inside my ribcage,” I explained to my mother late one Thursday night. I was curled on the couch wincing as another bout of unrelenting pain flashed through my right side. “When it wakes, sometimes it breathes fire and other times it tries to claw its way out of my chest.”

I was desperately trying to make her understand how I felt. She squeezed my hand and called me "sweetie." There was nothing she could do but comfort me and wait for it to pass. I was going on the second week of a rare and unexpected diagnosis. Earlier in the week, I was at work sitting at my desk when another wave of pain shot through my back and wrapped around my chest. I hunched over with tears glazed over my eyes, my fist clenched. It was everything I could do not to slam it into the keyboard.

The dragon roared.

I finally gave up and called my mom crying in the hallway. My entire right arm began to tingle numb and uncomfortably to the slightest touch. She told me to get on the earliest train home; we had to go to the emergency room. "I have a rib injury," I told my manager who encouraged me to go home, get some rest, and feel better.

It was just an intercostal tear, I told myself—the muscles between my ribs must have torn during my nine-mile hill workout. That’s when the pain set in, at least. I needed physical therapy and maybe a muscle relaxer, at most.

But I was wrong, very wrong. I sat shyly behind pulled hospital curtains with my shirt off. The red rash that showed up shortly after the initial post-run pain had spread like a streak of wildfire from the middle of my spine to beneath my right breast. This is bad, I thought as I listened to a whimpering girl with a neck brace in the curtain next to me. My mom stood with a smile meant to calm me.

1.Diagnosing The Dragon

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The physician’s assistant walked in first, as is the routine for most hospitals now. One look, one explanation of the pain I had endured for nearly two weeks was all it took for him.

“You’re the youngest case I’ve ever seen,” he said. “You have shingles.”

Yes, you know it as the disease old people get when their immune systems are so low it leaves them weak and vulnerable enough to reactivate the virus. If you’ve ever had the chickenpox as a child, within your body lies the dormant varicella-zoster virus, waiting for the right moment to awaken within the nerve tissue near your spinal cord and brain. Nearly one out of three people in America will develop shingles at some point in their life, and less than half of them are younger than 60 years old, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

A doctor saw me next. He was much older than the PA and stepped in close, his face within inches of my chest. He scratched his beard and mumbled, "Yes, certainly the youngest" and left. A new PA came in to examine me. "They’re getting younger and younger," she said, shaking her head. A nurse followed in shortly after who told me I had pretty eyes. That’s because I have sick eyes, I recalled my grandma saying—glossy, bright blue, and full of worry. But instead I felt like a freak show, a leper, an oddity. Nothing in my life compared to the pain, which the PAs and nurse seemed to understand.

"People cry," the nurse told me. I nodded solemnly. Yes, I know, I thought. I know why they cry.

The first PA returned with a slip to stay home from work. He explained how important rest was and wrote four prescriptions, an antiviral, an anti-inflammatory, and two different pain medications. He told me I needed to follow up with a doctor when my medications were done, and reassured me I wasn’t contagious. Only people who never had the chickenpox or the vaccination were at risk if they touched my ribcage because they had no immunity to it. But they wouldn’t even develop shingles, just the chickenpox. Those who already have the virus, whether they contracted it from a childhood playmate or a sterile needle, are susceptible to having it awaken within them.

I asked him why this had happened to me: a 25-year-old, who was in otherwise peak health. I barely even catch a cold. "Stress—a lot of stress," he said. When you’re stressed, your immune system drops to dangerously low levels. The stress hormone cortisol floods your body and wreaks havoc on everything from organs to emotions. Upon reflection, I realized I had always stacked my schedule with a child-like invincibility. Now, I was finally paying for it.