Living With Shingles: Diagnosis Gives Busy Mom a Sign to Slow Down
Key takeaways:
Healthcare professional and mom Laarni San Juan was handling multiple stressors when she was diagnosed with shingles.
Her vacation to Hawaii got sidetracked when she had to spend 8 days in a Kauai hospital.
Today, she hopes to help others by sharing her story and participating in a shingles study. And she has become more mindful of handling stress.
Full-time nurse and mom Laarni San Juan is accustomed to dealing with stress. In 2021, however, it affected her physical health. During that time, she was part of San Francisco’s COVID response team. She was also caring for her aging mother and parenting a daughter navigating online high school at the same time.
It took a shingles diagnosis to force her to rest and reflect.
Laarni was getting ready to take a much-needed family vacation to Kauai during Mother’s Day week in 2021 when she began showing symptoms of shingles. The same virus that caused her to have chickenpox as a child, varicella-zoster virus (VZV), had reemerged during this stressful time as a viral infection that causes shingles. While she planned on relaxing during vacation, she never counted on an 8-day hospital stay.
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Stress triggers shingles
Like many working moms, Laarni is a multitasker, and the pandemic meant even more stress while on the job.
“There was no respite from it,” she says. In addition to workplace stress, she was helping her daughter navigate her senior year of high school, taking care of her aging mother, and juggling marriage.
![“While it [shingles] was such an inconvenience in life, I do see it as like the bigger lesson is for me to slow down.”](https://www.grxstatic.com/4f3rgqwzdznj/1aQUIQDeXtcaH2cecq2W0P/88ab22dc33c160ed5759fd0b6c1893ba/patient_sanjuan_GFX_quote_1.png?format=png&auto=webp)
In 2021, she celebrated Mother’s Day with a lunch out with her husband and daughter. Afterward, she headed to a salon to have her eyebrows done for a much-needed family vacation. Later that day, she noticed what she thought was a small pimple on the left side of her face, but she didn’t give it much thought.
Shortly after arriving in Hawaii with her family, the single “pimple” had spread, turning into several spots. She went to an urgent care clinic and was immediately sent to the hospital.
“The Kauai healthcare system was very good,” she says.
But the 8-day hospital stay derailed her vacation.
“This variety of the shingles virus was a broccoli-shaped rash on just the left side of my face because it only gets hemispheric,” she says. “It hit the upper left corner in my case, which meant I had my eye closed. It was painful near the upper part of my face near my scalp on the left side, [and felt] almost like constant thorns.”
Scars serve as a reminder
Laarni’s healthcare team in Kauai included an ophthalmologist, a neurologist, and an infectious disease doctor. They gave her an IV infusion of an antiviral medication because the shingles rash was near her eye. She took several oral medications to treat her shingles, including Valtrex and Acyclovir. And she was also prescribed steroid eye drops — which she still takes — to reduce inflammation in the cornea of her left eye.
Laarni before and after:
Laarni says she hopes others can learn from her diagnosis. So she signed up for a local shingles study in fall 2021 for which she takes two daily pills. Yet she is unsure if she is taking a placebo. Although her scars are still healing, she has a slight droop on the left side of her face.
Shingles diagnosis was a sign to focus on self-care
Laarni is working full time again after taking 3 months off for medical leave. The time off forced her to reflect on the business of her daily life.
“While it [shingles] was such an inconvenience in life, I do see it as like the bigger lesson is for me to slow down and not worry about my mom or my college daughter,” she says. “I just have to let it go because I can't do much about it.”
During her time off, she began devoting more time to her meditation practice.
“As far as my activities of daily living, nothing has changed. But my mindset has changed. Now, if I notice a stressor comes up, I ask myself, “Can I really control this?’” she says. Her family has been integral to her healing by providing emotional support and reminding her to relax.
She actively shares her shingles experience on social media, and recently participated in a live webcast during the height of her scars’ redness. She admits to feeling self-conscious about the scarring and being unable to wear makeup while they healed. However, she has found “lots of support from the external world” and found that people readily approach her about her shingles experience once she got the courage to share.
Laarni is also the bestselling author of “Beyond Success.” It was published before her shingles diagnosis and focuses on entrepreneurs and how they turned setbacks into leaps forward. As one of her Instagram posts says, her shingles diagnosis “was definitely a memo handed to me from the Universe to chill and be still.”
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