New York Times bestselling author Jennifer Haigh joins Vicki this week to discuss her new collection of short stories, News From Heaven, an unflinching look at the conflicting desires of escape versus the enduring hold of home. Today Vicki also presents a treasure trove of information regarding shingles, a painful and debilitating disease that affects around 1 in 4 people sometime during their life. 

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In ten interconnected short stories, Jennifer Haigh returns to the vividly imagined world of Bakerton, Pennsylvania, a coal mining town rocked by decades of painful transition. From its heyday during two world wars through its slow decline, Bakerton is a town that refuses to give up gracefully, binding — sometimes cruelly — succeeding generations to the place that made them. Advance praise from the Boston Globe calls News From Heaven “Vibrant, thought-provoking, profoundly readable,” and the Library Journal calls it “… a masterly collection.” The award-winning Haigh has penned four critically acclaimed novels, and her short fiction has been widely published.

If you have ever had chickenpox, then you are potentially at risk to come down with Shingles at some point in your life. Shingles is caused by the reactivation of the chickenpox virus that most people get during childhood, and is similar in that it is typically characterized by an extremely painful rash and blisters on the skin. It can lead to serious complications, such as post-herpetic neuralgia, a painful and long-lasting condition caused by damage to the nerves resulting from the shingles virus. The older you get, the more at risk you become, as 2/3 of shingles cases occur in those 50 or older. Joining Vicki today to shed light on this frightening but manageable disease is Dr. Robert Duarte, director of the Pain Center at North Shore-LIJ’s Cushing Neuroscience Institute in Manhasset, N.Y., and Dr. Erin Moore, who earned her medical degree at the University of Washington and is certified with the American Board of Dermatology. We’ll also hear from a listener about what her father went through after coming down with shingles.

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