Thank you kindly. Yeah, I've had travails. But so have a lot of other people. On the upside, I was blessed by being given a very good brain, a sharp memory, a pretty good way with words, and an excellent sense of humor. So overall, I feel I did okay in the crap shoot of life.

I only divulge the root cause of my pelvic pain is coz I think other people might be afflicted with it. Shingles affects a huge number of the population, particularly over 50, but I've also known a number of young people who've had shingles, including recurrent forms of it. Varicella zoster virus is pretty much ubiquitous in the human population, but given this surprisingly very little research has been done on it.

The other reason I share this info is coz the medical profession tend to say and assume all female pelvic pain is due to endo, when that might not be the case. So many women who've had surgeries for end still find no relief from the pain. Part of the reason might be the faulty methods the surgeons are customarily using - my guess is that cauterization of endo is far less successful than excision with a surgical knife, as David Redwine postulated in the 1990s. But another reason might be that there is something else going on in addition to endo or entirely apart from it in some or many women with chronic pelvic pain.

A highly-credentialed urologist I've gone to believes that a lot of women with chronic UTIs/cystitis are suffering from shingles of the urinary tract, but that's just a hunch he has - he can't get any funds to test his theory. But he's started prescribing anti-VZV drugs like acyclovir and Valtrex to women he sees who still have bladder and urinary pain after their acute bacterial UTIs have cleared up. His theory is that the bacterial infections in the female urinary tract, and the antibiotics used to treat them, open up the way for an outbreak of VZV. In much the same way that antibiotics use often result in an overgrowth of candida, aka "yeast infections."

Again, thank you for your kind words.