If you go back to urgent care for the same problem you were seen for three days ago, they will treat it as if you had never been there before, right down to giving you your disease handout as if you’ve never seen it before. But this is what I needed to do to get adequate pain meds. It certainly doesn’t cut down healthcare costs to bill my insurance company for an extra urgent care visit, when all I needed was provisions for pain relief that I wasn’t provided three days ago. (And if I were uninsured, I’d have spent $150 on an office visit to get a $2 generic prescription.)

I’d have gone to my primary care provider, but I don’t see my new one until Friday. I’ve been waiting two months for this appointment, necessitated by my lack of confidence in my previous provider, a nurse practitioner who would always point out how my health conditions were complex and declare, “I’m not that smart.”

I hope the new internist I see Friday can give me some better explanations of what’s going on with my shingles than the NP and MD I’ve seen on my two visits to urgent care. (I have nothing against NP’s as primary care providers.)

Today, the doctor put down on my sheet that I’ve got shingles and neuralgia, where the latter is the deeper pain that’s been as a big a problem as the blisters.

Neuralgia is a sharp, shocking pain that follows the path of a nerve and is due to irritation or damage to the nerve.

I wouldn’t describe the pain as either sharp or shocking. I don’t know how I’d describe it. Throbbing? But that’s different.

Today’s urgent care doctor was all set to give me a referral to a neurologist, assuming I’m going to have postherpetic neuralgia. Yes, shingles is in the herpes family. Imaginethe Family Feud announcer: “Introducing the Herpes family! Shingles, Chickenpox, Coldsore, Mononucleosis, and CMV! Ready for action!” That reminds me, I had CMV last year. Well, half of us have it. It usually just doesn’t become active, unless you have a compromised immune system.

Anyway…it certainly doesn’t help that I’m sitting up in bed typing this. I need to lie down. Read. Watch more Archer. Play Words With Friends on the phone. Anything but sitting up, because it friggin hurts.