Weekly Photo Challenge: Unusual

Today’s prompt was issued in the middle of March but regular readers will know that it’s not unusual for me to be weeks behind in responding.  My friend Delilah will tell you that it’s also not unusual for I, who have nothing, to quote Tom Jones songs at the drop of a hat.  Actually, she wouldn’t: she’s a lady.

If you are new here, please say you’ll stay until tomorrow: there’s something ’bout you baby I like.  At this moment, darlin’, I bet you’re screaming ‘rescue me!’  It doesn’t matter if you don’t come back – memories don’t leave like people do.  Go!  Help yourself!  Especially if you’re reading this and it’s four in the morning.  If you decide to stay, you can leave your hat on, baby: it’s cold outside.

Back to the challenge:

This is Spud, aged seven.  His teacher came out with him one day and asked me to take him to the doctor to have him checked.  There was just one lump at the time.  I thought it was an insect bite and I had been treating it with antiseptic lotion.

Spud is unusual.  Spud had shingles.  The doctor who treated him said it was only the second case of shingles he had seen in a child in thirty years of medicine.  Spud is a medical freak.  Shingles is extremely painful – something about the nerve endings – but not for him; no pain at all.  And no more than these few lumps.  The doctor assured us it was shingles, however.  He even asked our permission to write Spud up in a medical journal (granted).

Spud had to be given a large injection as a result of contracting an old man’s disease; I forget why.  Maybe to reverse the ageing process?  Spud lay back, brave little trooper, while Mummy uttered soothing rubbish and Daddy waited in the reception area because, if Spud cried, Daddy was going to have to punch whoever hurt his little boy.  Spud is unusual: he didn’t cry; and that needle was BIG.

He doesn’t get the usual childhood ailments – apart from a really mild bout of chicken pox, which is what led to him contracting shingles.  He had to be hospitalised at eleven months with bronchiolitis, despite being breast fed.  He had his appendix out at eleven.  When his BCG was due, his arm reacted to the HEAF test and swelled (swolled?) up: no need to have a TB vaccination, Spud – you’ve already got the antibodies floating around in your weird system.

What’s next?  I can’t help but wonder.  The doctor told us at some point that Spud will get shingles again, probably in his eighties.  The good news is, it won’t bother me then: I’ll be dead.  But it will be painful enough to make a big man cry.  Poor Spud. 

Related articles

• The likelihood of contracting shingles is still high even if you did not get infected with chicken pox beforehand (uclaislamicstudies.com)
• this shingles really got on my nerves (avocadojuice.wordpress.com)
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Jones_discography