The morning it started for real, my four-year-old ran at me in the kitchen the way she does every day, arms wide, full speed, and I flinched backward into the counter to keep her from touching my left side. She stopped. She looked up at me, confused and a little hurt, and asked why Mommy did not want a hug. I did not have an answer that a four-year-old could understand. The shingles rash on my ribs had healed weeks earlier. The pain had not left with it. It had moved in.
That is what no one tells you about postherpetic neuralgia. The blisters scab over, everyone assumes you are fine, and meanwhile the nerves underneath keep screaming long after there is anything left to see.
A house full of people I could not touch
I was thirty-four with three children in Burlington, and I built my whole day around not being touched. I wore the loosest shirts I owned and still the fabric brushing my side made me catch my breath. Seatbelts were a negotiation. Carrying my youngest on my hip, the thing I had done without thinking for years, became impossible. I started asking my older two to climb into their car seats themselves and felt like a failure every single time.
Nighttime was the worst. The pain seemed to wait until the house went quiet and then it would build, this burning electric ache wrapping around my ribs, and I would lie there not sleeping while everyone else did. My husband would reach for me in the dark and I would move his hand away. I missed being held. I missed being a mother who could scoop up a crying kid without bracing for the cost.
I did everything my doctors asked. I saw my primary care physician, then a neurologist in Greater Boston. I tried the nerve medications, the ones that left me foggy and slow in the middle of chasing three children. I tried the patches, the creams, a different prescription, then another. Some took the edge off for an hour. Nothing made it stop. Months passed. I started to quietly accept that this was just my life now.
The neighbor who would not let it go
It was a neighbor in Lexington, a woman whose own mother had been treated for nerve pain, who kept bringing up a clinic in Burlington. I brushed her off more than once. I had already done the real medicine, the specialists, the prescriptions. I did not believe acupuncture was going to touch something my neurologist could barely manage. I went, honestly, so I could tell her I tried it and move on.
Then I met Dr. Min Jeon, and the appointment did not go the way I expected. She did not glance at her clock or talk over me. She sat down and asked me questions no one had asked, about exactly where the pain lived, what made it flare, how I was sleeping, how I was coping with three kids while feeling like this. She listened to all of it. When she explained what she was seeing in plain language, nothing confusing, nothing I needed to decode, I understood my own body better than I had in months. She told me part of my care would use ATP Resonance BioTherapy®, gentle low-level frequencies meant to calm the inflamed nerves and support healing. And she was clear that she would work right alongside my neurologist, not in place of the care I was already getting.
The first time I picked her up without flinching
I did not wake up cured. That is not how it went. But a few weeks into seeing Dr. Min, driving in from home and sometimes past Woburn and Billerica on the way, I noticed the nights were quieter. The burning that used to peak at midnight had dulled to something I could sleep through.
Then came the morning my four-year-old ran at me again, arms wide, full speed. And this time I did not flinch. I caught her and I lifted her up onto my hip, that left side that had been off limits for the better part of a year, and I held her there. She wrapped her arms around my neck and had no idea she was giving her mother back something enormous. I stood in the kitchen and cried into her hair while she asked what was wrong.
When I went back to my neurologist, she looked at how much I had backed off the medication and asked what had changed. I told her about Dr. Min and the clinic in Burlington. She wanted the details written down. She told me to keep going.
I am not going to oversell this. My doctors still manage my care, and they should. But for the first time since the rash healed, I am not organizing my entire life around avoiding my own children. For any young parent across Greater Boston living with postherpetic neuralgia and quietly running out of hope, I needed you to hear that there was more to try.
If postherpetic neuralgia or stubborn nerve pain is stealing the moments that matter, you do not have to keep enduring it alone. Call Acupuncture & Wellness Clinic at 781-221-0162 or schedule online at awclinic.com.
Acupuncture & Wellness Clinic | Burlington, MA | Serving Greater Boston including Woburn, Lexington, Billerica, and Bedford | Specializing in postherpetic neuralgia, nerve pain, shingles recovery, and complex cases for over 25 years.