My Humble Thank You and Update on my Condition

#55 2024 The Rowen Report

Dear Subscriber,

I want to give you an update on my condition with shingles. As most of you know (save recent readers) I came down with the worst case of shingles I’ve seen in anyone in my career. I know there are far worse cases, especially those involving the eye. I wrote about it here and called it a “Demonic Pain”. I rated pain as 15 on a scale of 10.

Well, first, I humbly want to thank you all for your prayers, support, concern and love. Scores of people spontaneously let me know they were praying for me and sending me energy. I have absolutely no doubt as to the benefit of this for reasons I will explain.

I also want to thank all who spontaneously reached out with treatments, treatment ideas, devices, products, and more. It is impossible to name you all here.

I am better, much, much better. In fact, rating my discomfort on a scale of 10, it is now generally less than 0.5. In other words, barely even noticeable. However, there is a bit of rash left after several months, and if I bother those areas, I know they are still not “normal” by irritation within.

After I endured indescribable pain for several weeks, I crawled into our new thermotherapy heat dome and raised my temperature to 103ºF in 30 minutes, and remained in it for 1 hour. (We got this device for supporting cancer patients).

The next day the pain was halved. I was shocked. As a physician, I know that the most feared problem with shingles is post herpetic neuralgia – a condition of indefinite post infection pain that can last forever and is very hard to treat, since the virus, varicella, actually invades the peripheral nerves themselves, damaging them, sometimes beyond repair. While one side of me was fearful of this, the other side maintained abundant faith – faith.

I treated the shingles more vigorously than anything in my life, and more vigorously than we can treat most people for anything. After all, we have devices and machines professionally that the average person does not have, and I made use. I took a ton of supplements, and used a variety of topicals, most, actually donated to me. I used healing devices loaned to me. And, as usual, I made my offering to Creator every night before sleep.  My offerings simply included gratitude. Gratitude that other than the shingles, I was in good overall health (yes I do have macular degeneration, but by gratitude offered thanks that I can still see, years after the diagnosis). I was/am grateful for our exciting work, ability to serve, ability for my wife and I to economically make it under extraordinary circumstances, and strangely enough, even for the harshness I endured at the hands of government. I was/am extremely grateful that it was I who got the disease and not Terri. Grateful for all who were pulling for me. I did not pray for God to come out of heaven and heal me, but only expressed gratitude for my/our blessings.

At the same time, with all the well wishes I received from friends, colleagues, and especially Substack readers, I felt God was with me, even without me offering prayers for myself. Prayers from others were reaching me and I had confidence that recovery would continue. It has.

So, I want to thank you all, here and now, for all you did for me. From those who did provide devices, products, services, and to all who simply held me in their thoughts and prayers. And to the health professionals who messaged us with ideas, including a very unique injection of dextrose subcutaneously to reset damaged nerves towards the end of my saga. The other unique injection given in mid saga was ozone in an epidural injection by a far away friend.

I cannot credit any one thing. I believe that the above entire package together rescued me from living out my life in terrible pain. One personal friend told me a relative of his laid down on his front yard and blew his brains out from long term shingles pain involving and damaging his eye. Yes, I could definitely identify with his plight.

The rash continues to very, very slowly heal. And as it does, the residual discomfort regresses with it. Some people with post herpetic neuralgia experiences considerable pain even if the rash fully heals!

I now believe I will have a 99.9% recovery if not a full one, but am more than grateful to have reached this instant state of affairs.  

Please don’t give up on your health challenges!

Again, I humbly thank you all.

Robert Jay Rowen, MD