By Elissa Caterfino Mandel

Some of my father’s wrongheaded convictions have, oddly enough, turned out to be right. It was my dad who insisted that my mom needed to go to the hospital this weekend.

“They’re going to the ER for a rash?” my sister asked. It was easy for her to be incredulous about the whole thing from Ohio. I was having an equally hard time with the concept in Manhattan where my husband and I had just lucked into a spot and were heading into Artexpo.

We got into the car and turned back to New Jersey.

Before this Sunday at noon, I never realized that in the pantheon of rashes, it’s always smart to root for an allergic one. A histamine rash resolves with Benadryl, the assisted living nurse told me over the phone, and that’s a good thing. But your mother’s rash, it’s just getting worse. Of course it was.

I didn’t hear much of what the nurse said next until she got to the word hospital. Let’s just say that if you’re almost 82 years old and you have a rash that doesn’t go away and it’s a Sunday, they call an ambulance.

I have nothing against ambulances, but this was the first beautiful day of spring, and when I spoke to my mother the day before, she had insisted her rash was nothing, the result of sleeping on the tiny crack that separates my parents’ twin king bed. It was a hopeful but fictitious explanation.

When we convened at the ER about an hour later, my husband, my mother, my dad and I learned that my mom now has her third case of shingles in less than three years. This is ridiculous. Until my mother was diagnosed, I didn’t even know this was a possibility. It’s like winning the misfortune lottery.

Shingles suck. And the worst thing is my mother was just coming up on the six-month mark since her last outbreak. That meant she might have actually been able to get the new shingles vaccine and avoided this latest fiasco, um I mean, case.

Now my mom is in quarantine at her assisted living place, which means she can’t go even go to the dining room for meals. Everything is coming to her, including her food, her doctors and my son and me.

I used to say I wanted to live to be 120. As of today, I’d like to amend that. I’d still like to live to be 120 but only if I could have the mind and body I had at 40. Hell, I’d even take the mind and body I have at 57, though, to be honest, I wish I looked better in a bikini.