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FIGHTING LYME DISEASE
Mayors daughter bitten by tick
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A visiting home nurse gives Stephanie Smith a painful injection as her mother Veronica DeBrum looks on. - photo by GLENN KAHL/The Bulletin
A long-time Manteca nurse, Stephanie Smith, 44, is suffering from a tick bite that has developed into a serious case of Lyme disease.The tick bite occurred after spending time in the foothills hunting for deer and fishing with her husband Eddie. The daughter of Manteca Mayor Steve DeBrum and his wife Veronica, Smith said the Lyme disease effects have literally taken her life. “One thing I loved was taking care of others and now people are taking care of me,” she grimaced.Today she is pretty much a prisoner in her own home for fear of what else she might contact in the outside world of bugs and germs – getting very nervous when she is wheeled out the door of her home.“I am a patient who has gone seven years untreated until December when it was diagnosed and an effective treatment was started and stopped after 28 days when the insurance company ruled against a new treatment,” she said.There is no Lyme disease on the West Coast; the family remembers being told by her insurance company representatives.