Just the Chicken Pox

(Author’s Note: The following is a true story. The name of the sufferer has been withheld for their protection, but the story is a firsthand account of their experience. I publish it now with their permission, in the hope that others will see the light about the issue at hand.)

It started out innocently enough. One day, when I was thirteen, I wasn’t feeling very good. A strange itch crawled across my scalp, and my eyelids were dark and swollen. By the time my sibling got home with their friends, I was scratching my scalp, and several small welts had appeared on it. It was my sibling who first suspected chicken pox.

Thermometer

By the time my parents got home from work, my whole scalp had erupted into blisters, and I was trying not to scratch them. I wasn’t very hungry for dinner that day, so I just went to bed and tried to sleep. I felt an itch on my stomach and discovered two blisters had appeared there, too. They were definitely chicken pox blisters.

The first twenty-four hours were fine, except for my rash. I tried not to scratch, but it was difficult with the itch. To avoid breaking the blisters and spreading the infection, I tried scratching with the palms of my hands, but it didn’t do much. Mom brought home some calamine lotion, but that didn’t help the itch, either.

By the end of the night, the problem had transformed from an itch to an intense, tingling burn. The electric tingle spread across my body, and not just in the places that had blisters. My neck and jaw started to ache, as if someone had punched them and caused a bruise. By the next morning, my jaw was so stiff that I could barely open my mouth.

It wasn’t long after this that the headache started. At first it was just a pain across my eyes, causing me to squint in the bright light. Soon, however, it had professed to a pounding, throbbing pressure. My neck was so stiff that I couldn’t turn my head, and my jaw was so stiff and sore that I could no longer eat. All I could do was lay in bed and stare at the ceiling, which was doing this strange, vibrating thing, where it rocked in and out with my heartbeat.

My rash had spread by this point. It was everywhere! On my stomach and chest, under my breasts, in my genitals, on the bottoms of my feet and the palms of my hands, on my face and eyelids, and even inside my mouth.

A quarter-sized welt appeared on my hip. It began to grow, until it was the size of a dinner plate and covered most of my hip. It was black and it smelled terrible. I know it was infected, but nothing was done about it.

Neither did anyone seem to notice the neurological symptoms now inflicting me. My vision became clouded with strange, white, waxy bubbles that floated in the air around me. Sometimes these bubbles would grow until my vision was completely blocked by white light, then they’d shrink down to nothing. Whenever I closed my eyes, I saw rainbow fractals moving across my vision.

I was in agony. The pounding of my head was unbearable at this point. My rash felt like I was constantly being electrocuted. My jaw throbbed and refused to open. The only food I could get down were the Icees that my mother brought home from the convenience store every day when she came home from work.

No one took me to the hospital. My father would come into my room every day and ask, quite sternly, if I was ready to get up yet. When I didn’t answer, because I couldn’t speak, he’d go away again. The next time I’d see him was when he’d come in to stiffly inform me that he was going to work.

My mother brought me the drinks every evening after work, but she didn’t think about taking me to the doctor. She was one of those Boomer women who refused to believe that doctors could help. To her it was “just chicken pox” and nothing to worry about. (This is the same woman who refused to call 911 when I passed out in a puddle of my own vomit from a severe allergic reaction as an adult.)

But this wasn’t just chicken pox. It was a particularly virulent strain of the virus, which had killed two eight-year-old children in my city around the time I was sick. The virus was not sticking to just a skin rash, it was going into brains and organs and wreaking havoc. Even after reading the newspaper articles about it, though, my parents still didn’t take me to the hospital for treatment, and I was too sick to ask.

It was three weeks before the illness finally passed, and I was able to walk again. The weird wax bubbles disappeared, and my headache went away, and the scabs finally dropped off and disappeared. However, there were still lingering effects from the infection.

I had lost over ten pounds. When I closed my eyes at night, I still saw fractals on the backs of my eyelids. I suffered from post-herpetic neuralgia on my left hip. The rash left deep scars on the sides of my face that remain to this day, despite never scratching them. My speech pattern had changed to a slower pace, and my voice was lower, another effect that lingered for the rest of my life.

One day, I opened a book, only to discover that I couldn’t read it. Yes, I could read every word on the page, but I couldn’t put them together to get the meaning. I also discovered that my ability to do even basic mathematics was impaired. I remember the day I added two plus two and came up with five.

Both these details frightened me. I refused to tell my parents, fearing how they would react. I spent the next five years rebuilding the burnt connections in my brain until I could read again. Mathematics took a little longer, and I still occasionally get a wrong number when I do math inside my head.

The emotional toll was even worse. When I returned to school the next year, after three years of home school, I was struck by bouts of severe depression that would make it difficult for me to learn anything. Some days I was fine, and other days I would crash into the depths of despair and apathy. My mother tried to blame it on hormones, because I was close to puberty, but I knew better.

Those bouts of crippling depression interspersed with periods of extreme fear and anger became a lifelong problem. In fact, they grew worse as I got older. By my forties, I not only suffered from emotional turmoil, but I was also starting to suffer blackouts.

I am now on lifelong medication to control my symptoms. This medication has allowed me to have a regular life, but I still can’t help but wonder what my life would be like had I never had chicken pox. Would I be a different person? Where would I be working? What would my family situation be like? Of course we will never know.

Why have I told this story? Well, when I was a kid, people didn’t get a vaccine for chicken pox. Sometimes parents would purposely expose their kids to other kids with chicken pox, in the hopes that they would get the disease young before it became more serious. It was a roulette game as to whether the infection would be minor or severe.

I’ve heard several anti-vax people come out and say, “Well, we all had these diseases, and we came out fine.” It makes me so angry that I want to punch each one of them. Because no, we did not “all” turn out fine. I certainly didn’t.

Recently, vaccines have been under attack by political extremists, who are slowly chipping away at the health outcomes of the country. A completely unqualified person is in charge of the health decisions of this country, and his choices are endangering the future of vaccines in this country, and the health of children everywhere.

I ask that man now, do you expect to pay for the health effects left behind by the diseases that these vaccines prevent? You say you want to “make America healthy again,” but at what cost? Imagine an entire country on lifelong medication because it was “just the chicken pox” or “just the measles.” Tell that to the lady I met at Crater Lake who was permanently stuck in a wheelchair because of polio. Tell that to me.

Vaccines should not be a political issue. They should not be used as a pawn or a distraction in the crap show that is the presidency today. Are these people really willing to let other people, children, die for the sake of their stubborn stance? Sadly, I think it is so.