“When I first saw her, she was very ill,” Yang said. “Then, I was just hoping that she would survive.”

Kym, 48, had a very high fever and was complaining of a severe headache and stiff neck when her husband, Bruce, took her to the emergency room on May 28.

“I thought of meningitis and immediately ordered antibiotics and a spinal tap,” Yang said. “I was shocked when that test was negative.”

He also tested for Lyme disease and West Nile virus, but those results came back negative as well.

Yang then suspected that Kym had Rocky Mountain spotted fever, an illness spread by an infected tick, more commonly a dog tick.

“I had treated that before in Illinois,” Yang said. “It was a pediatric case that didn’t survive.”

The most recent cases of Rocky Mountain spotted fever in this area were in 2002, said Dr. Diane Helentjaris, director of the Lord Fairfax Health District. One of the infected people was a Winchester resident, and the other lived in Frederick County.

More than half of the cases nationwide occur in the South Atlantic region, which includes Virginia, according to information posted on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Web site.

Twenty-two cases of the disease were reported in Virginia in 2003, and eight have been reported in the state since Jan. 1, Helentjaris said.

Although a positive trace for the disease was discovered in Kym’s blood, more testing is being done to determine if she had the illness.

Yang says he feels confident in his diagnosis and believes that Bruce’s quick thinking saved his wife’s life.

Kym became ill two days after she had been mowing grass at the couple’s Christmas tree farm in Nain.

“I don’t recall the last time I pulled a tick off of me, because it’s common to find them on me after I come in from mowing,” she said.

Although she went to work that day, she came home very tired and complaining of abdominal bloating.

“I went to bed early, but Bruce woke me up because I was so hot,” Kym said.

At one point, Kym’s fever got as high as 105 degrees.

“I still ... thought I just had a virus,” said Kym, a nurse and psychiatric case manager at Winchester Medical Center. “I kept treating the the fever and thought it would run its course and go away.”

Bruce said Kym’s fever appeared to have broken when he went to work two days later.

“Then when I came home that night, she was really bad,” he said.

When Bruce realized his wife was too sick to make a rational decision about her symptoms, he took her to the hospital.

Bruce said he actually had thoughts of his wife dying when he was watching the emergency room staff treating her.

“Dr. Yang told me that whatever was going on with Kym was very serious,” he said.

Kym was hospitalized for four days. She said she doesn’t remember anything about the night she spent in the emergency room, and it was two weeks before she could return to work.

“I really just started feeling good around July 1,” she said, “but I still don’t have the energy level I used to have, and I still have some joint discomfort.”

If Kym’s case of Rocky Mountain Spotted fever is confirmed, she will be immune from contracting it a second time. But she’s still being more careful about protecting herself from ticks, as well as mosquitos.