A mother-of-one is revealing how she overcame her fear of water after nearly dying from a brain-eating amoeba she caught while swimming as a child.
Kali Hardig from Arkansas, was 12 years old when she fell into a lake and water went up her nose, exposing her to the brain-eating amoeba Naegleria fowleri.
A few hours after the accident, the young girl developed a slight headache, but within 24 hours was rushed to Arkansas Children’s Hospital in Little Rock barely conscious.
A spinal tap revealed she had primary amebic meningoencephalitis (PAM), or severe brain inflammation, which had been caused by the amoeba.
The infection kills nearly 100 percent of people who have it.
Ms Hardig spent a month in a coma and through intensive treatments, became one of only five people in the US to survive the infection since 1978.
Kali Hardig, 23, pictured above with her one-year-old daughter Adalynn, revealed the infection left her scared of water for more than a year
Ms Hardig is pictured above after recovering from the infection at Willow Springs Water Park, where she says she contracted the amoeba
Doctors at the hospital initially tried to turn Ms Hardig away, saying she had the flu, but her mother would not take no for an answer and demanded she was tested for other infections.
They thought she had meningitis at first, inflammation of the protective membranes that cover the brain, because of her neck pain and sensitivity to light.
But the spinal tap, where fluids are taken from the spinal canal, revealed she actually had the amoeba infection.
While she has since fully recovered, she occasionally suffers from blurry vision in her left eye due to scar tissue left over from the disease.
‘It causes me to have some blurry vision every now and then, but that’s about the only long-lasting effect I have from it,’ she said.
After first being diagnosed in July 2013, Doctors told her parents the infection was a ‘death sentence’ and gave her a less than one percent chance of survival.
They said she would likely be dead by the weekend and that, if she did pull through, she would need to use a wheelchair for the rest of her life.
She told PEOPLE: ‘They did not tell me at the time, they just told me I was very sick and needed to fight.
‘I had never heard of [the amoeba], nor had anyone in my family.’
To treat her, doctors initially placed her into a medically-induced coma — which can help to reduce inflammation and swelling in the brain and protect the organ.
They then administered amoeba-fighting drugs including the treatment miltefosine, which had to be flown into the US from Germany.
After 22 days, doctors reversed the girl’s coma and she spent an additional month in the hospital receiving more treatment.
After 55 days, Ms Hardig was well enough to be transferred to a rehabilitation center.
Ms Hardig said after fighting off the infection she was like a newborn baby and had to relearn everything, including the ability to walk and talk
She also said at the rehab center, they tackled her fear of water and eventually got her to swim in the center’s pool again
She said at the time she was ‘like a new baby’ and had to re-learn everything, including talking and, which she said was most challenging, how to walk again.
Around the time of her recovery, her parents explained to her how she had caught the infection from water — which instantly made her afraid to even take a shower.
‘After mom and dad told me how I got sick, I did not want anything to do with water — I wouldn’t even take a shower,’ she wrote.
‘I was so scared, so at therapy they started working with me at easing me into the pool at Children’s.’
This involved, in part, explaining to her that the water had been heavily treated with chemicals and would not contain the amoeba.
Ms Hardig, now 23 years old and a receptionist, said she was ‘thrilled’ to overcome the fear, because she had loved swimming before her illness.
She is also thankful to have overcoem her fear of water so she can now teach her one-year-old daughter Adalynn to swim, though she said she will tell her to always wear a nose clip.
N. fowleri kills about 97 percent of everyone it infects and is deadly because it rapidly spreads to the brain and starts to kill tissue
Naegleria fowleri lurks in warm bodies of freshwater like lakes and rivers and may infect someone if they get this contaminated water up their nose.
Once an infection begins, the amoeba travels along the olfactory nerve to the brain where it triggers widespread inflammation and damage to the organ in what’s known as primary amebic meningoencephalitis (PAM).
Warning signs of the infection include a splitting headache, high fever, stiff neck and confusion.
More than 97 percent of patients die from the infection, according to the CDC, while many of those who survive are left with life-long disabilities.
The infections are very rare, with only about 10 cases recorded every year. Records show 157 people in the US have been infected previously since 1978, of which only five survived, according to the CDC, including Ms Hardig.
There have been no cases of the amoeba publicly reported in the US this year, but in Israel a 25-year-old man is reported to have died from the infection after swimming in the Sea of Galilee, an inland and freshwater sea in the country.
In 2023, a child in Arkansas and a resident in Georgia died from the infection after swimming in freshwater.
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