When I was 16 years old, I came down with the Chicken Pox virus. It was perhaps the most miserable experience of my life as I suffered through the agony of sores and blisters from the top of my head to the bottoms of my feet. In those 2-weeks of suffering, laying around with some type of lotion my mother said was best, I remember stinking because I couldn’t bathe, I couldn’t eat, couldn’t get comfortable to sleep, it was hot and I think I lost about 25 lbs. When I found out this week that form Ranger now Kansas City Royal Alex Rios along with fellow teammate Kelvin Herrera has the Chicken Pox, all I could think was that at their age, they must really be in misery.
They have an immunization for that now that everyone should get, because from personal experience I can share that the older you are the more miserable an experience it is likely to be. In my case, I even had them inside my mouth and my throat so eating solid food was impossible, almost like having tonsillitis. The Chicken Pox virus is highly contagious, and I remember when I was a very young kid my mother deliberately trying to expose me to it. That may sound cruel by today’s standards, but I was born before the vaccine and mom thought it was the best way to handle it so that it would not be so awful when I was older. Unfortunately, for me, I failed to get it when I was only 4 or 5 years old and paid the price later at age 16.
Alex Rios is age 34 and Kelvin Herrera is age 25, and it takes about 5 days before things begin to ease, but much longer before the blisters crust over and completely heal. The itching is terrible, and knocking the scabs off can cause scaring.
I know that there are all kinds of raging debates about immunizations, and there are those opposed to all of them. However, in the year 2015 this is one disease that as a child is almost nothing, but as a teenager or an adult is purely terrible. If you personally have not either had the immunization or had the virus as a child, take this as a wakeup call and go get that taken care of now. You not only risk your own personal health, missed time from work, but you expose others to that misery for no reason.
As for the Royal organization, it is a very good thing that they have such a massive lead in the playoff race, because something like this could have crushed the team’s chances at post season. The entire organization and I suspect all of baseball is now double-checking all of their player’s individual medical histories so that they prevent this from ever happening again. I wish Rios and Herrera a speedy and quick recovery, because I know what they are going through, and it is terrible. The year is 2015 and it is time to end these nuisance diseases!
One thought on “Chicken Pox”