In 1998, two months before her 30th birthday, Davis was diagnosed with MS. In retrospect, she realizes that she had been having symptoms for years before her diagnosis and should have been diagnosed in her early twenties. Attributing frequent fatigue to all-nighters working on projects and papers in college, tingling to overexertion or awkward sleeping positions, and fuzzy vision to wrong eye prescriptions to combat her severe nearsightedness, she ignored these persistent signs for many years. Finally, when the tingling did not go away, she went to a doctor who gave her an explanation—relapsing-remitting MS. Her neurologist put her on a drug therapy, with the goal of slowing down the progression of the disease. "So, here I am… years later still on a drug therapy and in remission. Having MS does not mean the end of your life. What it does mean is going on with your life, being active about taking control of MS and not letting it control you," Davis explains.
Davis has also taken it upon herself to educate others about the disease. "Those of us who have MS need to speak out and be active in educating the newly diagnosed and the general public," Davis says. "It is only through knowledge that we can discredit the stereotypes of what a chronic illness looks and feels like."
Along with using her words as a medium to educate, through speaking at fundraising and educational events for MS, she has also shared her message through her art. Her photographic book, My Story: A Photographic Essay of Life with Multiple Sclerosis (Demos Medical Publishing, March 2005), presents portraits of 32 people living with MS, through photos, personal stories, and secondary accounts from those who love them. She shows how multiple sclerosis preys on people from all walks of life by providing an outlet for individuals of different ages, ethnicities and socio-economic background to have their stories told.
As she does with her battles in her personal life, Davis faces the task of breaking apart the preconceived notions of debilitating illnesses through her art. Davis claims that her book "is just the start of [her] quest to expose the falsehoods of what life is like living with a chronic disease of disability." She also published a book on living with breast cancer, The First Look (University of Illinois Press, September 2000) and is currently working on a book on osteoporosis. Davis lives in San Francisco, CA.