Ocular shingles

Ocular shingles is diagnosed after a one-sided rash and a later episode of severe abdominal pain interrupt the narrator’s preparations to return to the mikvah. The illness moves through several competing explanations: a clinic doctor initially suspects chickenpox, while a hospital infectious-disease specialist identifies orbital shingles and suggests that it may have been contracted in the ritual bath. The uncertainty, the enforced delay, and the possibility that a religious practice exposed her to illness unsettle the narrator’s sense that fulfilling a commandment should protect her from harm.

Emergence and First Diagnosis

The illness begins during the period of waiting required after the narrator’s first attempts at intercourse with Eli. Irritation and bleeding lead the rabbis to rule that she is niddah; because the source of the blood cannot be determined, she must count seven clean days, or use fourteen cloths, before immersing in the mikvah. The cleansing process takes two weeks, and, a week before the planned immersion, she wakes with intense itching on her left arm. By morning, a rash has appeared across her arm and shoulder.

Unable to secure an immediate appointment elsewhere, she goes to the local health clinic on Heyward Street. She usually avoids the clinic at the ODA medical center, which is run by the Hasidic community, government-funded, open to all patients, and often crowded and dirty. Dr. Katz examines the rash but takes time to reach even a tentative assessment: he is eighty percent sure it is a form of chickenpox, though he cannot be certain. He prescribes an antiviral medication as a precaution and explains that it must be taken within forty-eight hours of an outbreak to reduce the illness’s severity and duration, not eliminate the virus.

The possible chickenpox diagnosis surprises the narrator. She had been vaccinated as a child and had been exposed to the disease since then. She is embarrassed to tell Eli, but the diagnosis also means she cannot go to the mikvah. Since she had already been dreading the immersion, the illness temporarily gives her a reason to postpone it and a respite from the immediate pressure surrounding the ritual.

Progression and Hospital Diagnosis

The rash does not remain confined to her arm. It spreads to her left leg, the left side of her abdomen, and finally the left side of her face, while leaving the right side unaffected. The distribution makes the illness unusually conspicuous to her. She treats the itching with oatmeal baths and anti-itch creams, and embarrassment about her appearance keeps her at home until the symptoms begin to clear.

Eli responds to her status as niddah by noting that he cannot touch her during that period. His remark places the illness inside the rules already governing their newlywed relationship: the required separation continues, now alongside an illness that has further delayed the couple’s plans. Three weeks after the rash first appears, the spots remain, though they are beginning to scab over. That night she wakes with severe abdominal pain and vomits for hours. Eli calls a friend who is an emergency medical technician for advice.

The friend, Michoel, is part of Hatzolah, the local organization with its own ambulances and paramedics. Its policy is to take a woman with abdominal pain to the hospital in case the pain involves her uterus. The narrator and Eli are dropped at the NYU emergency room. She waits before being examined and is first given medicine for her fever. When a doctor finally sees her, he calls in an infectious-disease specialist. The specialist diagnoses orbital shingles. Looking at Eli’s religious clothing, he says that she probably caught it in the ritual bath. This is the hospital’s explanation, not a confirmed account of how she contracted the illness.

Religious Meaning and Bodily Vulnerability

The suggested connection to the mikvah changes the significance of the illness for the narrator. She recalls the warm pool of water she may have shared with hundreds of women and is shaken by the possibility of contracting a disease while carrying out a commandment. She had been taught that a person could not be harmed through a mitzvah and that the merit of the act would protect her. The specialist’s explanation makes that assurance feel vulnerable to ordinary physical risk.

The episode also compounds a sense that marriage has brought one difficulty after another. The narrator wonders whether the rash and its complications are a sign, drawing on the superstitious tendency she associates with Bubby. But the possibility offers no practical escape: by the time she asks what the illness might mean, she feels unable to change her circumstances. The narrative does not establish that the ritual bath caused the shingles or that the illness is a divine warning. Instead, it records the gap between a doctor’s uncertain explanation, the narrator’s religious expectations, and her experience of a body that has become a source of fear and disruption.

A Wider Pattern of Medical Uncertainty

Other health episodes in the same newlywed period add context without being identified as symptoms or consequences of shingles. In another stretch of illness, repeated vomiting and loss of appetite lead her doctor to order tests, including X-rays and CAT scans. He offers Xanax and identifies anxiety as the reason for taking it. This diagnosis gives a name to a different set of symptoms; the account does not connect them medically to the shingles.

Later, when the couple’s difficulty with intercourse continues, a sex therapist recommended by Dr. Patrick attributes the problem to vaginismus. The narrator reads that the condition is common among women raised in repressive religious environments and learns that treatment involves retraining the muscles. The prescribed plastic dilators come in progressively wider sizes; rather than practice in the therapist’s office, she orders a kit online and works with it at home while Eli attends evening prayers. These separate diagnoses show how bodily distress in the narrative is encountered through different routes—clinic, emergency room, primary care, and therapy—without making one condition stand in for another. Ocular shingles remains a specific episode: a suspected infection, a hospital diagnosis, a delayed immersion, and a challenge to the narrator’s expectation that religious observance guarantees protection.