Follow Us In Our Travels

April: into Virginia, with family and...shingles :(  and our second anniversary of full timing on April 13th :)

We made it to our sons and daughter-in-law's place, and time to sit still for a while.

Curt hadn't been feeling good this week, to the point I was ready to take him to the ER some place along the way. It started out with a headache that wouldn't go away, then pain in his left shoulder and arm, sometimes to the chest. Being the EMT he was, he didn't think it was typical heart attack symptoms (not that everybody's symptoms are typical, right?) and decided to just watch things. We picked up some Bayer aspirin at a Walmart and he took some of them. A few hours later he broke out in hives on his left arm. Okay, he's allergic to aspirin now. Once we got to their house and got the RV set up in front of their house, we decided (I, really) to find a walk-in clinic to get Curt checked. We found one a couple of miles from them, and went in. No offense to any nationalities, but we had a hard time understanding the doctor. He said Curt just had muscle pain, which can cause headaches and shoulder and arm pain, and probably an aspirin allergy. He gave him 4 prescriptions. We were putting caladryl on the rash to help dry them up. They didn't itch like a rash though, more of a hurt. Curt was looking up rashes on the Internet, and he thought he probably had shingles. So Saturday morning (2 days later) I called the doctor he had seen and told him that things were getting worse, more pain, rash was blistery now, and we thought it could be shingles. He told us to go to the ER, because if it was shingles, he couldn't give him the antiviral he would need. So, an ER trip it is. There we explained the meds and diagnosis he was given the first time, what we thought it was instead, and he was given more prescriptions and some meds in the ER.

We hadn't gotten the shingles vaccination; Curt said he didn't know there was one, I just had chosen not to get it. After what he went through with the shingles, a month of pain, I've changed my mind.

Other than that, family time was good, including the cats and a dog. We did some remodeling and painting, had a garage sale, and my daughter-in-law and I went to DC for the cherry blossoms and the zoo. More on that in the next post.

Some old buildings

and some beautiful ones

More logging

Lots of trees, and look at those hills ahead.

Just the sign every RVer wants to see - "Road Narrows".