When Crissy Naticchia’s husband of 26 years suddenly developed a fever, she was immediately worried, as she had never seen him sick before. She rushed him to the emergency room, and though all the tests came back negative, his illness continued to get worse and worse.

“He had been having drenching sweats— so bad he would have to change his clothes and bed sheets,” Crissy said. “Urgent care tested his urine and diagnosed him with raging kidney infection, and prescribed him antibiotics. The fever and sweats went away but he still felt weak and not well.”

Things got so bad that he had to leave work one day and go back to the emergency room. Though tests continued to come back negative, doctors found that his kidneys and liver were shutting down. It was only when he was transferred to a facility specializing in liver malfunction that he was finally diagnosed with Babesia, which is a tick-borne illness that attacks red blood cells. Crissy’s husband’s case was particularly severe considering he didn’t have a spleen.

Crissy decided to head home for the night after doctors gave her husband medication. However, doctors called her at 4:30am telling her to come back to the hospital because his blood pressure was dropping and his spleen was giving in.

Crissy’s husband died two hours later.

Now, Crissy is trying to use what happened to her husband to educate others about parasitic infections.

“My son, now a junior in high school, has no father to teach him how to drive, to talk to him about girls, to help him choose a college— nor to see him reach all of these milestones,” said Crissy. “My husband was all about his family— he did everything for us, unconditionally— which we took for granted like most people do. Now that he is not here, we feel lost and scared and alone.”

“I lost the father of my children because he was bitten by a tick and the infection that developed is not widely known. If the doctors were able to diagnose him one, two, or four days earlier, might he have survived? We will never know,” Crissy concluded. “If we had been educated, perhaps it might have made a difference.”

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