Battling a Deadly Brain-Eating Amoeba

Fight like a girl. That’s what 12-year-old Kali Hardig’s parents told her on Friday, July 19, 2013.

There was nothing else to say. It was impossible to believe that just the day before her crushing headache and relentless nausea started, Kali and two pals had been giddily playing king of the hill at a water park near Benton, Arkansas. It was there, doctors told the devastated parents, that Kali must have gotten water infected

with a brain-eating amoeba up her nose. The creature then travelled along her olfactory nerve and into her brain, where it began feasting on her brain tissue – a condition called primary amoebic meningoencephalitis. The doctors said it was about 99% fatal – only two people in North America had ever survived. “We had to tell her parents that it was very likely she would not be alive in 48 hours,” says Dr Matt Linam, the infectious disease specialist who treated her.

Still, doctors at Arkansas Children’s Hospital jumped into action, pumping Kali’s body full of antifungals and antibiotics as well as a rare, unapproved German drug they got from the Centers for Disease Control; lowering her body’s temperature to 33°C and putting her in a medically induced coma in an attempt to reduce brain swelling; and hooking her up to a ventilator, then a dialysis machine for her failed kidneys. For two weeks, Kali’s medical team worked around the clock just trying to keep her alive – a complex balance of preventing low blood pressure and stopping episodes of high blood pressure that worsened brain swelling.

“We had good hours and bad hours, not days,” says Dr Linam. Slowly Kali’s brain swelling stabilised. Doctors decreased her sedation and increased her body temperature, unsure if she would be the same little girl when – or if – she woke up. “We just didn’t know,” Dr Linam says, “but two days later, she did a thumbs-up, and her parents knew she was still in there.”

Kali would be in the hospital for eight weeks, relearning the most basic of functions, like swallowing. But eventually she officially became survivor number three. Kali is now a healthy, normal teenager.

Doctors don’t know exactly why she lived. (A 12-year-old Florida boy, diagnosed days after Kali, received the same German medicine but didn’t survive.) “Number one, it was God’s grace,” Dr Linam says. “Other than that, it was countless little things that went her way, countless little miracles that happened every day and made the difference between life and death.”