Teen puts hope in U.S. Lyme disease treatment
She takes few steps towards the camera. As wobbly, as unsure, as unsteady as a baby’s precarious first steps. As awkward as a drunk stumbling out of the bar.
Her arms hang limp. Her face, a blank stare.
This is what has become of 14-year-old Kamea Crowe.
Her mother, Yvonne Finlayson, recorded the few seconds of video three weeks ago. Mom and daughter have been in Florida since April, hanging their hopes on an unconventional treatment for a disease that has turned an energetic girl into a teenager too weak to run and play.
Although many Canadian doctors are unconvinced, her family believes Kamea has Lyme disease. An infection caused by a bacteria carried by blacklegged ticks.
Kamea does not remember being bitten by a tick. And she never noticed the telltale bull’s-eye circles of infection.
What they do know is this: life changed for Kamea the day she spiked a fever in December 2009. She was 10.
The extreme fatigue that followed, they assumed was the flu. Only, it never went away.