Viola Davis reveals disease that left her with 9 out of 10 pain

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, includi...