Shingles are indeed horrible. My mom and my grandpa have had them, and they are very, very bad.

However, you probably have something else. Don't freak out!

Shingles is not all that common, and is often triggered by high stress situations. The same virus that causes chicken pox is responsible for shingles. The virus lies dormant in your system. Most of the time it never reoccurs as shingles. So, you would have had to have had chicken pox at some point in the past to get shingles. Shingles also affect only one side of your body at a time, never both.