When I got back from my restful writing retreat in the Santa Cruz mountains a few months ago, I noticed a rash above my breast.

Could they be bedbug bites? Maybe spider bites, I thought, or possibly,
poison oak sap had somehow been on the sheet that I’d slept under.

By the following day it didn’t look like poison oak.
It was the holiday weekend, so I took a photo
and sent it to my fabulous doctor.

“You have shingles,” she said. “Oh, and that photo has great resolution!”

“Shingles?” I asked. “How could that be?”

I had no other symptoms. I hadn’t been sick.
My immune system wasn’t compromised.

Turns out that 60% of cases have no identifiable cause.
As my doctor inferred, sometimes shit happens.
And there seems to be a small wave of it going around my acquaintances.

Fortunately, it was a mild case, no heavy duty pain: only a couple days of maddeningly itchy skin. and some ugly-ass blisters,
followed by little waves of tingly electrical current and a slightly sore neck.
Sounds worse than it was.

These things (and worse) seem to happen to people more often as they age.