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This Moment
A week after I turned 51, I got shingles. I didn’t know I had shingles, mind you. I assumed the rash was poison oak, though I couldn’t figure out for the life of me how it had bloomed on my upper thigh, around my side and back, and into my groin.
I’d taken my daughter the previous week to Orr Hot Springs in northern California. I paraded around naked for three days, still feeling pretty, somehow. Knowing I’m old, of course, but knowing also that, as old as I am, I was blessed with a body that used to be “good.” So, sagging though they may be, my breasts are still reasonably pretty. But more than that, I don’t really care anymore. It feels good to be sans swimsuit at the hot spring, and so I was. My daughter, at 17, was more demure.
After we got home, an itchy rash appeared on the top of my right thigh. We’d hiked in the beautiful Montgomery Woods State Park. We’d traipsed in and out of diminutive meadows between and among pristine, soaring redwoods. I thought I’d picked up poison oak there.
As the week wore on, though, I became dubious. The rash spread along my right side. The skin became oddly numb and a bit tingly. After several days of this, I discovered the lymph node in my right groin had grown as big as a golf ball and was exceedingly tender to the touch.
I immediately assumed it was a tumor pressing on a nerve. That would explain the…
