Well, to me, it sounds like you were suffering from an extreme allergic reaction to something. Possibly a reaction to the meds you were taking. Or, because one of the treatments to Herpes Zoster is cortisteroids, the meds you were taking could have acted to reduce a coincidental allergic reaction.
My non-MD guess would be that you got hives on top of some prior illness. I think hives can come up quickly and go away quickly.
I’ve had measels, chicken pox and really bad poison ivy, all of which lasted forever, as experienced by me as a child. Regardless of miracle status or not, just be glad you didn’t have the blisters for weeks!
I should’ve just said, “Yea. What Finagle said!”
It reminds me of a scripture that says"Be still and know that I am God; I will be exhalted among the nations, I will be exhalted in the earth"
God is awesome!
God, in this case, gave a 70-year-old woman a pretty yucky three weeks. What was the purpose?
I don’t believe in God, but if He was real and He used his powers to cure you from a non-fatal disease, I would seriously wonder what’s going through His mind. There are thousands of families who lose their helpless little child to something as awful as brain cancer. Many times a whole congregation is praying for the child. The child dies anyway. The family is devistated. When believers say “God had a purpose” for the child’s death, I feel a huge amount of anger. What purpose could it be to take the love of a child away from a family. The family never gets over the heartache. I can’t imagine that if there’s a heaven and the family arrives, they thank God for taking their child from them. What lesson could be worth that? If that happend to me, I’d punch God right in the face and tell him to send me to Hell. At least with Satan you know where you stand.
As for the OP, I think it’s a case of selective memory and your mother’s perception being influenced by her belief.
God has a purpose for everything. We are not meant to know everything God knows (otherwise we woulnd’t need God)
I’m not going to say anymore otherwise the moderator will move it to the Pit. All I can say is seek not unto your own understanding!
Fuel: Since this is IMHO and not GD, I’ll simply say that I dub myself a “thinking Christian”, meaning that I have a very strong faith but also a very strong need to challenge it at every opportunity. (Make sense?)
There’s many points in your story that are easily fallible. You could have had a more minor disease that would have easily gone away. Maybe it wasn’t as bad as your mother thought it was. Or, even if it was Herpes Zoster, the prayer/faith factor might have been irrelevant. Yeah, stuff happens.
But if I am to take the above as a given, I can believe that what you experienced was a miracle. I tend to think that God’s work in my life is a little more ambiguous, but your mother prayed, and her prayers were answered. My faith allows for big miracles that can’t be explained away, no matter how hard I try. So you decide how you want to interpret it - think about it, pray about it, whatever. Believe whatever you want to believe enough to argue its case. But no matter what you come up with, always, always be open to other’s interpretation.
Fuel, I won’t deny that God specially intervened for you and your family at that time. It’s impossible to disprove, of course, and I don’t deny the possibility in principle.
But – and I’m sorry if this is irritating – if God generally acted in this way, I believe we’d see a difference in the sickness and death rates of Christians everywhere. Almost every death is a prayer unanswered, or answered “No”, at least. Maybe God staves off death sometimes, but ultimately, the human death rate is 100%. It seems to be God’s will that we all die in the end.
I’d also warn you against anyone who might tell you to pray as if your prayer has already been answered, in the case of praying to save a life. I was once surrounded by a bunch of “true believers” in a hospital ICU waiting room, who were telling me and my family that the child couldn’t die, because we had prayed with faith against it. These people said the doctors (who had predicted a 20% chance of survival) just didn’t have all the facts; we knew that with God there was a 100% chance of survival.
They were wrong, of course. The child died. Afterwards, I never heard a word about how prayer had failed, or how the confidence of the pray-ers was misplaced. It was just an “oops” or “oh, well”. The incident cost me all my faith for many, many years, and I’ll forever be allergic to the utter confidence some people have that their prayers will be answered. Prayers go unanswered all the time; pick up any newspaper for proof of this.
Again, this is not to deny that miracles can happen. But I don’t believe they’re available just for the asking. And I especially don’t believe that the faith of the pray-er, or the quality of the praying, has much to do with whether a miracle occurs. (Unless, of course, everybody I know is merely doing it wrong, and it’s really the Catholics, or the Lutherans, or the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who truly have God’s ear. But they pray too, and their people still die.)
I explained why I think this is fact at the end of my 3rd post. Read this and tell me if I am being too subjective, I would like to know. (Note that I said, "It is fact, or as close to fact as a claim of this nature can be. ")
Yes. I am not sure if that is supposed to make me immune to Herpes Zoster, but indeed I have had it when I was younger than 12.
Ok Yoda! 
It’s pretty obvious here that I don’t have any practice or experience narrating. I am sorry for creating this confusion. I should have been in a more technical, factual mindset while writing the OP, but I was dumb and put in one or two of these types of opinionated statements. Sorry. Let’s amend the OP to say what I have said in my 2nd and 3rd posts.
I think I’ll research hives then. Maybe I’ll even ask in GQ what types of things this 30 minute illness was. It would be nice to have other experts’ points of view… but I don’t know if I’ll be able to get that with such a small amount of facts.
Could you provide some cites for that assertion? Are you a doc? I am open for this type of info… I don’t want to just jump to a miracle conclusion, I want to know about these things. It’s my motivation for this thread.
You know, on reading the OP, I thought to myself “That sounds like some kinda weirdass allergic reaction.” I’ve had a few personally where I get massive hives all over, swelling, etc., and then 30 minutes later, it’s like nothing happened.
Fuel, there are many resources on the internet where you can investigate your medical questions, for example:
Mayo Clinic on hives and angioedema
Skin Rash flowchart
Medscape dermatology info
Oh well…I get skipped again.
Dr.'s first diagnosis and what the 'scrip was for?
Perhaps it was an allergic reaction to the meds.
and to think I had a similar story to share. Hmmm 
bye
The seriousness lasted not long enough to warrant a trip to the hospital. Actually, if my dad was there at the time the swelling ocurred, we might have gone to the hospital. But my mom wanted to wait a little until my dad returned. It actually shows some faith that my mom didn’t rush me right off to the hospital. But, my mom, if she felt I was in imminent danger, surely would have not resorted to merely praying. It was a simple decision to not go on the part of my mom.
When I saw the doctor, I only had the minor symptoms that I described in my OP. So, there was nothing to diagnose when I saw him, only a fever and such. It was on the phone when he attempted to diagnose the problem. How correct or solid the diagnosis was is open to judgement…
Can’t remember the meds I was on. If I was older, I would have undergone a better collection of facts at the time, and would have asked my mom to take pics and such, but I was too young to know any better.
Upon reading the Mayo Clinic Hives page, my experience is definately congruent with a hives outbreak induced by meds or my weakened condition.
But, in anyone’s expert opinion, could an outbreak of hives do this to me?
…All info considered (I probably had a weak immune system at that point of outbreak. Could a weakened immune system defeat an outbreak that quickly and thoroughly?) How often does something like this happen?
‘only’ as opposed to what? He didn’t have you hospitalized? He didn’t drop on his knees and beg jesus to cure you? He didn’t cover you with leeches?
Prescribing meds is what doctors DO. It’s called ‘treatment’.
And I must say that I don’t think too highly of your father for his behaviors through this whole thing. He had to drive to work to tell them he couldn’t be there? A thirty minute drive to work, and he was only gone for an hour - so basically he got in the car, drove to work, stuck his head in the door and said “I can’t stay” and got back in his car and drove home. Fuel, How old ARE you? Was the phone not invented yet? I can’t think that ANY company would be so cruel as to not accept a phone call notification that he wouldn’t be coming in due to a serious family illness - and if they WERE that cruel, they probably wouldn’t accept his sticking his head in the door and saying he couldn’t stay, either.
I have a feeling that there is ALOT more to this family tale than YOU know.