By ANEEKA SIMONIS
WHEN Annette Bate started experiencing intense pain in her leg and foot, she thought she had a sciatic injury and saw a remedial masseur.
But as the days unfolded, the 66-year-old Emerald woman soon realised there was a much more sinister reason behind the pain.
Mrs Bate was diagnosed with shingles, an outbreak of a painful rash and blisters caused by a reactivation of the chicken pox virus.
“The first word that comes to mind when I think about it is pain,” Mrs Bate said as she recalled the painful weeks of stabbing, throbbing pain in her leg.
“It was quite debilitating… difficult to get around, to walk or to sit or just do normal stuff.”
For older Australians, shingles is a serious condition.
According to the Australian Immunisation Handbook, the risk of developing shingles significantly increases from the age of 50 with one in every two Australians over 85 hit hard with the virus over their lifetime.
Mrs Bate said the virus severely impacted her quality of life during her six weeks of suffering over April and May of this year.
“There were many, many sleepless nights,” she said.
If the painful rash isn’t bad enough, around half of the people who come down with the virus end up developing post-herpetic neuralgia (PHN), a chronic and debilitating form of neuropathic pain which can last up to years after the initial rash.
“I am one of the lucky ones apart from the fact that I have tingles in foot every now and then. Some people never recover,” Mrs Bate said.
Despite this, Mrs Bate has little idea what caused the rash in the first place.
“My doctor had no idea what brought it on but suggested that I was physically over-worked. On the lead up to getting shingles, I was doing a lot of heavy gardening work,” she explained.
While there is currently no cure for shingles or PHN, Mrs Bate cautions parents to vaccinate their children.
“I think parents need to think carefully about not giving chicken pox vaccinations.
“The reason people get shingles is because they had chicken pox sometime in life,” she said.
Older Australians who suspect they are displaying shingles symptoms are advised to see their doctor immediately.
