Chicken Pox

I want to write a post about having the chicken pox. I’m supposed to be going buy a new dryer today because our old one lurches and screeches the clothes dry, and recently lost the ability to heat up. I don’t like doing this kind of thing, but the clothes are piling up upstairs and I’m down to my purple, “only wear in an emergency,” shirt. Amazing, who would have thought that one day I would be using writing as a form of procrastination.

So if the theme of this post is the chicken pox, then it must be one of those childhood memory pieces, right? Wrong. I had the chicken pox at the tender age of thirty-five. I’ve always been a johnny-come-lately when it comes to music, politics, sports and infectious diseases. So I waited thirty years to get this one out of my system—I should have gotten it over with when I was six.

We think that the cause came from sleeping in a bed that my father had slept in while he was suffering from some weird condition known as the shingles. This is not to be confused with another skin infliction of equal severity known as the floor tiles. Daddy took his condition in stride, making up a little rhyme to help him in his discomfort, something like: “jingle jingle, I’ve got the shingles.” I thought it was clever, and I wasn’t worried about catching shingles or any other sickness on that particular trip up to see them.

This was in winter, when the sun never quite reaches an apex in the sky and sunny days mean constantly squinting through an afternoon, due to perma-glare. It is a terrible time to be sick, although when is a good time? “I caught diphtheria in early June, it was simply lovely, had the entire clinic to myself.” But winter, with its leafless trees and icy drafts, makes sickness pretty hopeless. So when I woke up at home feeling like my blood had been replaced by sludgy crude oil, and saw the blemishes covering my entire body (itchy blemishes at that), I felt winter was somehow in on the conspiracy.

When I was nineteen, I got the opportunity to work in a hospital in South Africa. One of the things I did early on was take photographs of people suffering from leprosy for a clinical study. The patients were in varying stages of the disease, and as I looked at my face in the mirror I identified, for the first time, with those South Africans. Yea, I know, Chicken Pox is definitely not as severe as leprosy, but it was hard for me to understand that at the time. Main point here is, I felt like hell.

But I had to be sure it was chicken pox. I called my mom to see if she had any record of me having chicken pox as a kid. Unbelievably, she was able to quickly produce records of our childhood illnesses and vaccinations. She relayed them over the phone, and it appeared that I had never had the illness, although my sisters had. A trip to the skin center at the hospital confirmed that if I didn’t have chicken pox, whatever I had was damn close to chicken pox. How’s that for a pinpoint diagnosis? So I “kinda had” chicken pox.

The doctor told me that whatever it was, it was highly contagious and that I would have to remain at home for at least two weeks. I pretended that this news disappointed me. “Aw, shucks, what am I going to do for two weeks?” I called work and broke the news to them, and listened as my former boss tried to find angles to have me work from home (impossible in the food service field) and prevent me from cashing in PTO time. He was unsuccessful at both, and all he could do was wait for the doctor to okay my return to work.

For the first two or three days I could do nothing but feel like a pile of rash-infected refuse. I seem to remember a debilitating headache which intensified with every inch I tried to lift my head off the pillow. The doctor had told me to take benadril, and Margaret bought me a topical cream for my rashes. The cream, however, did not react well with my face. In fact, it had the opposite effect of healing, and created an excruciating burning which lasted for an entire night. I spent the sleepless night with a wet towel over my face to comfort the searing skin. One of the worst nights of my life.

Back to South Africa. This interlude is not for the squeamish. The night of the evil face cream reminds me of another terrible night I had in the first week that I arrived in South Africa. I had just come from Scotland in January, and now that I was in the Southern Hemisphere, I noticed that my ghostly pale complexion contrasted sharply with the Tropicana tans of the “white” South African kids enjoying mid-summer. I had to act quickly. So the second day after my arrival I sat out in the sun for a good five or six hours. This, obviously, resulted in the worst sunburn of my life.

The family I was staying with had employed me (at their peril—a work ethic was still a long way off for me at this time) to paint the little round guest hut behind their house. A few days after my “tanning session,” I was in the hut working with paint and paint thinner. As I mixed the paint and cleaned the brushes I noticed that my skin was peeling at a rapid rate. I figured that the paint thinner was accelerating the peeling skin of my bad sunburn. It was pretty horrific, but somehow fascinating at the same time. I literally peeled a piece of dead skin off of my front torso the size of a small throw rug.

The discomfort came that night. The exposed new skin was so sensitive that it created the most agonizing itching imaginable. I was unable to stop scratching the entire night, and I was on the verge of waking the family up and asking for help, but I figured at the age of nineteen I was too old for late night pleas for sympathy. I suffered through that night and a couple more, and eventually, grew into my new skin and resumed normal, slacker activity. I developed a healthy respect for the African sun, however.

Back in the third circle of chicken pox hell, I slowly began to feel better. The exhaustion and headaches went away after a few days, and I was left only with the skin rashes which still had me looking like an extra in the leper colony scene of Papillion. My face was patches of white, pink, rouge and crimson—it looked kind of like the paint swatch section of a home improvement store. It didn’t really itch like I thought chicken pox was supposed to, it just looked slightly scary.

During those long two weeks—the freedom from work gave way to boredom around day five—I watched a lot of television. Ironically, the program that sticks out in my mind from that time was a showing of The Elephant Man. I’ve never seen this film on television as much as the time when I had chicken pox. I watched it, and when John Hurt yelled “I am not an animal!” I identified with him greatly. When Margaret would come home from work and comment on how my rashes looked pretty bad, I would shout “I am not an animal!” She failed to find this funny.

The first time I went out after catching the chicken pox, I was returning from the store and was pulled by a policeman. I can’t remember what pretext he pulled me for, maybe failing to use my turn signal, but as he checked my license and glanced at my face, he did a kind of double take and backed up slightly. I expected him to go “whoa… what the hell happened to you?” He quickly told me to be more careful, and let me go.

My return to work was met with equally silent astonishment. The contagious part of the trauma was over, but the blemishes hung around for another few weeks. It was maneuvered (because of the way I looked, I believe) that I would not have to deal with the members of the stuffy little country club I worked for. As usual, everyone betrayed their opinions through body language and facial expressions. Life went on though; eventually the blemishes faded, and the ordeal left only an opportunity for a story.

When I think back on it though, I am again reminded of an incident in South Africa. At the hospital, I followed one of the surgeons on their rounds. We came upon a woman whose angry and drunk husband had pushed her into a bonfire. Her entire back was covered in third degree burns. There is no way I can compare my slight discomfort from chicken pox to the agony this woman was experiencing. The degree of her trauma is sobering when I start to imagine that chicken pox should be a subject of pity. The woman will have to live with her injury for the rest of her life. I, on the other hand, only have to be reminded of my illness when, every so often, TCL shows The Elephant Man.