I need to clarify my statement: You do not have to GIVE UP chocolate and peanuts, just do not eat them until your lesions clear up and for at least a week afterwards. Life is not worth living without chocolate! It's just that I am 10 times more likely to have an outbreak if I just ate an entire jar of peanuts, and it soon became obvious that the herpes would break out again if I didn't lay off more peanuts and chocolate for a few weeks afterwards (both mixed together are as deadly as you can get, i.e., Reese's Peanut Butter Cups). It has been worth it, however, to be able to put an end to the outbreak before it really gets serious. The first indication that I am going to break out is a pounding pain on the left side of my head and lethargy. This starts about 24 hours before the outbreak. I immediately rush for the bottle of Lysene and get three of them down as quickly as possible. There have been times where this actually kept the sores from erupting, my upper lip and inside my earlobe get red and hot but do not go any further and are gone by the next day.

P.S. Something I forgot to mention before: I control the drippy lesions by slathering with BLISTEX. It works nicely and the scabs can be wiped right off with a tissue that way. This beats the treatment the doctor in Albuquerque tried when I had the first episode. He cut away the lesions and filled them with gentian violet and then put my cheek under some kind of purple light. I now have pits on my face from that. In retrospect it sounds like witch doctor treatment, but nobody knew what it was in those days.

Wolf - wanna swap cravings? I can so easily stay off peanuts & chocolate for you, if you can stay off cheese & beer for me.

Sorry to hear bout your eye btw. Despite being hyper sensitive about mine I've never had a proper eye infection and even having my eyes lasered sent me into freak-mode.

Good luck.

PS - post RFN. We need a different version of NSFW :)

Mmmm....cheese and beer. Alllggghhhhh.... (Homer drool)

NSFW! NSFW!

Great. :( You just picked my other two favorite food groups.

Won't be able to trade out on that one ...

Damnit

Garlic? Chillies? Bread?
Meh, what am I thinking, you're a woman of taste (am excluding the Hello Kitty thing here of course :))

That's the one. :greenface

Gentian Violet? Oh god I used to freebase the stuff when I was a kid. I always had these fucking horrible chancre sores inside my mouth where the gums met the cheek. Awful.

We always used Blu-Kote brand gentian violet for the critters. Are you saying you put that stuff in your mouth? :vomit:

I had a friend get shingles after stupidly messing around with Xtasy, the drug.

Come to find out, that since Shingles lives in your spinal column, and drugs like Xtasy and acid have a huge impact and effect on your nervous system/spinal column, they can release things stored there. A bunch of ppl I know who have done Acid or X (never tried either myself) all complain about a stiff neck/back, back pain and tension, which from what another friend told me is the body reacting to the strichnine used to cut the drug (gee, and why is that I never played with hard drugs?:rolleyes: ).

He took too much, and it was released from his spine into this body. It spread over his head entirely, they had to cover his eyes with shot glasses. Eventually it went away, but he was out of commision for quite some time.

Sucks Wolf, hope you get better quickly, not fair to have to deal with somthing like that without a good reason or an obvious fuckup.

Steve

Made an hour long (one way), rush hour traffic drive to the doctor's office to get a note saying I can go back to work tomorrow.

Now that's a dedicated employee. :D
Couldn't they have faxed it to your boss? Or did they want to see you first?

Lately, time out of the house is always good time, even if rush hour traffic is involved.

I suppose I could have had it faxed, but it's actually better that I went in person. I called ahead to make sure that the note would be prepared, gave them several hours to work diligently on it, arrived at the office to have the Officer Manager look at me and say, "Note? What kind of note?"

"A note to clear me to return to work. My name is 'wolf,' spelled double-ewe oh ell eff."

"Oh. We couldn't find your chart. You had shingles? Are they all dry and crusted? Can you wait about 20 minutes until the doctor is done with a patient to have them looked at?"

Less than five minutes of searching in the place where my chart should have been prompted another office worker to say, "hey, there's some more charts over here ..." My chart was in the mystery pile. Should have been refiled a week ago, but at least they found it.

After displaying my scabs to the Office Manager, she wrote a note on a teensy little form (smaller than one of those "while you were out" pads) and faked the doctor's signature on it.

I hope the boss buys it. I'm running short on reasons not to kill my mother.

sorry bout the shingles wolf.
bbro: i used to never ever get poison ivy (and i blatanly walked through it) then I once touch it and then touched my mouth and got soaked into my bloodstream. It was awful I broke out randomly everywhere including my face, and what made the whole xp worse was a guy-friend in my grade (9th) had it on his penis at the same time (he had been pulling weeds and then went and took a piss). Fortunatly I haven't had an obvious case of it since but i can never walk through the woods w/ the same confidence again.
Don't kill your mother wolf unless you know of a good place to hide the body and you're good at acting.

Don't forget the best part - soak the scabs with Blistex and they will wipe right off without causing a scar. But dry it off or put a dressing over it when you go to bed; if it gets rubbed into your eyes while you are tossing around in your sleep, you will be very unhappy about it :neutral:

P.S. Something else I just remembered that the dermotologist told me: direct sunlight is very bad for herpes outbreakes, so stay indoors until you are back to normal.