Is your frenetic lifestyle that was the price of your successful career preventing you from succeeding on your journey of self-discovery?

While conducting our research for Changing Lanes, Susan and I learned that most people overlook the first essential step in the process - the need to quiet the mind and make health and vitality a priority. In fact, we learned this lesson the hard way - through our own personal experience. As Susan wrote in one of our Travel Tips:

When my division was acquired, I understood intuitively that the gift provided me was very precious indeed. I embraced my joblessness, realizing that it wasn't possible to chart a new course for my life if I continued working 24/7 while juggling multiple priorities. Expecting to feel invigorated, I was surprised by how physically exhausted I was. Happily, once I stopped working, I could focus on getting healthy.

We both focused on getting healthy. Losing weight, exercising, eating right, and visiting the doctor regularly - these were all part of a conscious program of recovery from the stresses of our work-lives. For the most part, our efforts paid off. We both attest to the increased energy and quieter mind that we achieved and how important these were to our success in changing lanes.

So what happened? Well, the story doesn't end there. Life is indeed a journey and the issue of getting healthy continues to challenge us throughout our lives. Some time ago, I started to feel pain that traveled across my left scapula (shoulder blade in the back) under my arm and across the top of my left breast. There was also numbness in my arm pit that, I must admit, evoked disturbing thoughts about scary diseases involving lymph nodes. I couldn't find a comfortable position to sleep in, so I was up most of the night popping Advils and pretending not to panic.

On Sunday night, I had had enough, so I wrote an email to my doctor describing my symptoms and asking if he thought I should come in for a check-up. He wrote back in the morning asking if I also had a rash. By then, a rash had indeed appeared tracing the same path as the pain I was experiencing. This proved to be the tell-tale symptom which pin-pointed the diagnosis. I had shingles.

What the hell is shingles?

Well, it's caused by the same virus that causes chicken pox (herpes zoster). If you had the chicken pox, as over 90% of US adults have, the virus can hide out for decades in a nerve cell and then decide to pop awake and emerge as shingles. The symptoms include nerve pain, itching, numbness, dizziness, and the familiar rash we all remember from childhood.

What awakens the virus from its dormant state? I don't have a very clear answer, but it seems to result from a weakened immune system. So that means the culprit(s) could be the usual suspects: aging, other diseases, some medications, and oh yes, STRESS.

It lasts several weeks (I'm, still not over it) and there's not much to be done about it other than anti-viral medication (presumably reducing the level of discomfort it could otherwise cause) and pain pills. I chose to keep the prescription pain meds to a minimum since I knew I'd be suffering around 3 weeks and didn't want to become dependent on them. (I had the same prescription as Bill O'Reilly and you remember what happened to him!)

I learned that there is a vaccine you can get if you've had chicken pox and if you're over 60. Apparently half the people who get shingles are in that age group. I'm writing this blog to alert our readers to the facts about shingles and encourage all of you (especially those over 60) to run, not walk to your doctor's office and get the vaccine to prevent this very uncomfortable disease.

Other than taking this specific precaution, you should also do all you can to build up your immune system, which gets us back to the same piece of advise we gave to our would-be lane changers: Modify your stressful life-style to make health and vitality a priority and to achieve a quiet mind. Only then, will you have the energy and mindfulness to make the kind of life choices that will lead to a successful lane change.