How much people Ann Garner believed that shingles was a “mild” disease – until 2024, when she herself became ill. If only she knew then that Norwegians call shingles shingleswhich literally means “hell fire” or that the Arabic name means “belt of fire– She could have been better prepared.
Shingles (shingles) is a common viral infection that causes a painful skin rash and can cause postherpetic neuralgia (PHN), a form of long-term nerve pain that can last for years. The English name comes from the Latin word for “girdle” because the shingles rash most often appears around the torso, although, as Garner discovered, it can also affect the face and eyes.
One in three people will get shingles in their lifetime, but it is risky increases dramatically after the age of 50 or for anyone who has a weakened immune system. The disease is caused by the reactivation of the varicella-zoster virus, the same virus that causes chickenpox when it first enters the body. The virus can lie dormant in a person’s nervous system for years until it reactivates – often, but not always, when immunity begins to wane due to factors such as aging, immunosuppressive medications, or acute stress.
Garner, a 73-year-old retired pharmacy administrator from Wales, UK, believes stress caused her shingles. She was under enormous financial pressure from a high tax bill when she felt a strange tingling sensation on one side of her hairline above her forehead one afternoon in July.
Within a few hours, the feeling intensified – causing severe pain – and began to move down the face towards one eye. “It was like hundreds of invisible, tiny, hot needles were sticking into my scalp and face,” he recalled.
Doctors advised Garner to take acyclovir, an antiviral drug that may assist relieve symptoms within 72 hours of these will appear and an eye cream with acyclovir to protect your eyes as shingles can cause damage to vision and lead to blindness if it affects the eye.
But even after treatment, Garner’s face and eyelids soon became covered in a hot, red rash with angry blisters. “I couldn’t do anything to stop the feeling of being tortured by burning needles,” she says. “It was as if my nerves were severed electrical wires, hissing and sparking.”
Even though shingles is common, it seems that the public has only recently started to catch up with the severity of the disease. 2025 study by researchers from the University of Bristol in the UK points to inadequate public health messaging and a lack of communication about patients’ experiences with the disease: “The circumscribed literature on the experience and understanding of shingles suggests that people tend to think of it as a minor issue until they experience it themselves,” the researchers concluded.
Many people don’t realize that shingles can have a significant and long-lasting impact on their lives, says Martin Sollie, consultant plastic surgeon at Oslo University Hospital in Norway. Sollie is conducting research into the surgical treatment of chronic pain, including whether fat grafting to the skin can help reduce PHN. In 2022, he conducted a systematic review examining how shingles affects patients’ quality of life.
His meta-analysis of five studiesstudy, which included 2,519 patients from the United States, Europe and China, found that people with an acute case of shingles had quality of life scores that were 15 percent below the norm for physical health and 13 percent below the norm for mental health. “We were quite surprised that it actually impacted quality of life so much,” he says. “We know that if you have chronic pain it affects your quality of life, but it is very rare for a temporary and non-fatal disease to have this effect.”