Shingles pain returns

I got shingles earlier this year. Ack, is was horrible, as the photo's show. I remember searching for images online about shingles as I'd never heard of it before, but I honestly couldn't find anything that looked anywhere near as bad as what I got. My GP described it at the time as "full on". 

I did eventually educate myself about it, had plenty of time with two weeks off work with it. Enough time for it to reduce to only red blotches. Over time these have faded almost completely away, although it did take some months. I found out that they are a reactivation of the chicken pox virus, that after you get that as a kid the virus doesn't go but resides in the spine. They dunno why but something can cause the virus to reactivate (although shingles is more common amongst HIV+ people) and it travels from where it is in the spine down the nerves and comes out where the nerves do. There's different nerves that can be affected, but with my particular case the affected nerves just happened to be the biggest ones in the body; the sciatic nerves. 

It was really painful and I was put on a narcotic based painkiller for a while to deal with it. It was pain going from my lower back right down both my legs. Fuck, I don't ever do things in halves do I (that's how I got HIV I guess). Like the kidney thing; I don't just get an allergic sneeze or two, I get fuckin acute kidney failure!

Anyway I've noticed that at times the pain can come back a bit, at which times there are faintly visible red blotches that show up on my leg where the shingles used to be. I've been wondering why in the last week or so when going to bed both my legs have been throbbing, and have had to take some Panadol so I can go to sleep. Other night I even stuck a pillow under my knees and lay there on my back for a while, which seemed to help whilst I waited for the Panadol to work. And it wasn't until I noticed that the sciatic nerve was hurting at the top of my bum that I suspected a possible recurrence of the shingles.

And sure enough, when I took a closer look at my leg, there were the lightly red blotches. It's happened before over the last few months since I got the really bad attack so I'm not really concerned about it, but at the same time the pain involved in a recurrence hasn't been this bad. I'm only noticing it at night too, dunno what that's about. 

I'm sure it will settle down in a few days. It's not pleasant though.