Update at 11:00 P.M. (WZZM) - Almost three months after she was sickened by a mosquito bite, Tammie Fenn of Kent City says she is slowly getting her memory back and feeling more like herself.
"I feel okay," she says. "[I'm] a little emotional."
In June, Fenn says she started feeling head and body aches and general weakness. Her symptoms began shortly after a weekend camping trip at a friend's cabin. She was treated at a medical center for the flu and sent home.
"And she started to get worse," recalls her father, Vince Barone. "She got really weak and her temperature was up to 103, 104 [degrees]. That's when we decided to take her to the hospital."
For several days, her parents say doctors didn't know if Fenn would survive. They weren't sure what was wrong with the 20-year-old woman.
"It was a nightmare," says her mother, Brenda Barone. "She was having seizures, one right after another. That's when they decided to induce her into a coma for 48 hours."
"We were really scared," says her father. "Nobody knew what was going on."
Additional tests discovered Fenn had mosquito-borne encephalitis. After three weeks in the hospital and two additional weeks of therapy at Mary Free Bed Rehabilitation Clinic, she is slowly getting back to normal. But there are still many things she can't remember.
"I don't remember getting sick," she says. "I don't remember going with my friend to the cabin on that little vacation weekend. But I'm okay. Life is a blessing and I'm just glad to be alive to share and see how precious life is."
The Kent County Health Department says encephalitis is one of the two most common illnesses spread from mosquitos to humans. West Nile Virus is the other.