With sudden, excruciating pain spreading across her body, Viola Davis thought she’d been bitten by a poisonous critter.
“I would put it a nine out of 10,” she said of the pain in an interview with People. “I was surprised how much pain it was. Hard to lay down, hard to get up, hard to walk. Nerve pain, all of that.”
But what the EGOT-winner actually had was a very common disease that affects one in three Americans at some point in their lives.
The good news is that the virus isn’t life threatening — but there isn’t a cure. And before it works its way out of your system, the agony it causes is unfortunately very common.
Davis began experiencing her symptoms in early 2012, right after the actress adopted her daughter and received an Oscar nomination for “The Help.”
“I was working, working, working, running myself into the ground,” she said. “Then all of a sudden, I woke up with flu-like symptoms and an extraordinarily painful rash.”
“It started on my stomach and it wrapped around to my back. It went away and then it came back with three blisters on my upper back.”
She says that when her doctors diagnosed her with shingles, it was “the surprise of my life” — “I knew absolutely nothing about shingles.”
The disease is caused by the varicella-zoster virus, the same one that causes chickenpox. If you’ve had chickenpox, the virus stays in the body for life and may reactivate down the road as shingles.
Shingles causes a painful rash that typically looks like a single stripe of blisters that wraps around one side of your body. Doctors can usually tell at a glance with a visual check, but samples of the blisters can also be sent in to confirm the virus is present.
The rash can be itchy, sensitive to touch and cause a burning and tingling pain with fluid-filled blisters that burst and crust over. Some people, like Davis, also experience symptoms like fever, headache, fatigue and sensitivity.
Severe complications can result from shingles, including postherpetic neuralgia (PHN). This chronic nerve pain — which can feel burning, stabbing or aching — occurs where the shingles rash appeared and lingers for months or years after the rash heals. Adults over age 50 are at increased risk of this.
PHN can also cause damage vision if the rash appears near the eye (ophthalmic shingles), or nerve damage if the rash affects the nerve near the ear (Ramsey Hunt Syndrome).
There’s no cure for shingles, but doctors can prescribe medications that may speed up healing and lower risk of complications.
Lessons learned
“I felt that I sort of was immune to any disease at that point because I worked out, I ate right. I felt that I was healthy because I did all the right things. And then all of a sudden, I have shingles,” Davis said.
Eating healthy and working out won’t prevent shingles, although doing so is definitely good for your health overall. Still, we have a powerful tool to prevent shingles from developing.
Adults 50 and older and adults with weakened immune systems should get the two-dose Shingrix vaccine, which is over 90% effective in preventing shingles and lingering pain (PHN).
Getting shingles “woke me up to listening to my body, which I didn’t before that time,” Davis said. “I felt like I was a soldier and the more that I could muster through, the stronger I was. I didn’t know that that’s not what strength is about. Strength is about sort of loving on your body and experiencing good health as you age.”
Now she’s encouraging others to value their health and see a doctor when something is awry.
“Life is not supposed to be lived with anything that causes you debilitating pain,” she said. “I feel like I’m important enough and my body is important enough to listen to it and to honor it … I found that that is the key to aging beautifully.”
