She became so nauseated she could neither eat nor drink, vomiting continuously, which sent them to the emergency room. She was severely dehydrated and dizzy. On a second trip to the ER, she had a reaction to her nausea medication and couldn't close her eyes. The ER doctor told her to see a neurologist right away.

When she did, she was diagnosed was viral meningitis, with the expectation she'd feel better shortly. It just got worse.

Back in the emergency room yet again, her husband, Blake, refused to take her home. She was hospitalized and was in the hospital when results came back from a blood sample a doctor had earlier sent to the lab. She had West Nile in its most severe form — meningal encephalitis. The people most likely to have that severe form are the elderly and those with compromised immune systems. She's not sure if her diabetes made her more vulnerable.

She would be hospitalized for a month, including about a week in intensive care and two weeks in rehabilitation, before going home, still eating through a feeding tube, still weak and impaired.

Along the way, she's lost and regained various seemingly simple abilities, like swallowing. Her longtime friend and colleague JoDee Summers describes relearning to stick out her tongue as "huge," while Blake Dimond humorously recounts sitting beside her on their couch listening to her practice coughing "for hours and hours and hours" until he could hardly stand it.

She's still weak and fatigued and the thought of another mosquito bite terrifies her.

Blake Dimond doesn't smile as he remembers the horror of seeing his wife unable to move her face, lying expressionless, reliant on a machine for food. They were told she'd have some residual brain damage, but they're not going there, content that she has made so much progress, regained so much of who she is.

It would be a couple of months before she returned to her job as a program manager in communicable disease epidemiology for the Utah Department of Health. And six months after she was bitten before life would start to return to normal.

Even today, she's making little gains. But she may never get all the way back to where she was.

She forgets things more easily, she says, especially when she's tired.

One thing she doesn't forget, though, is putting on mosquito repellent and taking other West Nile precautions.

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E-mail: lois@desnews.com