Shawn P. B. Robinson

Hi there,

I wanted to stray a little from my usual blogging and, over the next twelvish days, share a little of my own personal journey with you.

Two years ago today, on January 27, 2017, my life took a bit of a turn (and hasn’t fully turned back yet). Over the course of the next number of days, I’m going to share my journey with all of you as I was introduced to something called encephalitis. I’m not planning on posting tomorrow, because 2 years ago on the 28th of January I didn’t really have anything unusual happen (that I can remember). I just hurt more, and I didn’t want to post an entire blog that simply said, “I hurt!”

So here’s Day One!

Friday, January 27, 2017

I woke up with a pain in my eye. It hurt… a lot.

I don’t want to be melodramatic. I don’t want to be a drama king. I don’t want to exaggerate, so I’ll tone it down a bit. If you have a squeamish stomach, perhaps skip this next part.

Here is a gentle way of describing the pain I felt in my eye. It felt like someone was inside my head and trying to dig their way out through my eye with a knife.

There, you have a gentle, toned-down description of what it felt like.

I wasn’t sure what to do, so I contacted my optometrist, but she was not able to fit me in. My NP was not able to either, so I went to the emergency room in town.

When I arrived, my eye was red, and I was in a lot of pain, but there wasn’t much visibly wrong with me. I looked healthy and strong; I just had some pain in my eye. They did some tests and came up empty.

One of the tests, I remember, was a real shocker for me. He told me he was going to test my eye for herpes. I had no idea that kind of thing was possible. How might one get Eye Herpes??

I was relieved, at the time, to find that the test came up negative. Little did I know that eye herpes wasn’t as gross as it sounded, but it was serious, painful and very present in my eye.

I went home from the hospital with some ointments for pink eye as the doctor could not figure out what was actually wrong. I gather it was just too early in the process for the Eye Herpes (or “Shingles in the Eye” as it is referred to by saner people) to show up. I spent the next four days having no idea what was going on. I just knew my eye hurt and, in time, my head began to hurt as well.

To be continued…

To follow the next part of this journey, click here.

NOTE: There is no Day Two of this Journey (the story goes right to Day Three). Nothing really happened on Day Two other than I sat around wondering what to do about the pain in my eye.