After a Tick Bite, a Fitness Influencer Experienced Symptoms Often Ignored – Now She’s Partially Paralyzed

Maria Palen had built her life around wellness — running long distances, chasing physical challenges, and documenting her progress online. But in early 2024, strange symptoms began to interrupt her rhythm. The cause wasn’t immediately clear, and by the time doctors discovered an infection in her bloodstream, irreversible damage had already set in.

In the months that followed, she lost her mobility, her home, and the independence she once took for granted. Her experience with a rare tick-borne illness has raised questions about medical blind spots, early warning signs, and what recovery looks like when the diagnosis comes too late.

‘Small Aches, Tiny Pains’: Early Signs That Went Overlooked

At first, the symptoms were easy to dismiss — minor aches, fleeting pains, and a lingering fatigue that seemed out of place but not alarming. At first, Palen chalked it up to overtraining or stress. She tried to push through the discomfort, assuming that rest, hydration, or a tweak to her diet would resolve whatever was going on.

But nothing helped. Over the next few months, she lost 20 pounds, felt exhausted doing simple tasks, and watched as her normally fit body weakened rapidly. By March 2024, she was confined to bed and unable to stand on her own. In a video shared to Instagram that September, she reflected on how suddenly her condition escalated.

“Here is how I lost a year of my life and counting… It started with small aches, tiny pains that most people might ignore, but then, my body completely gave up on me,” she said. “Why was my body failing me? I’ve always lived a healthy lifestyle. This didn’t make any sense.”

Despite following a healthy diet and staying active up until that point, her body continued to deteriorate. She felt like her immune system had completely collapsed. Even small daily tasks like locking her phone or turning the steering wheel became painful and exhausting.

Doctors initially suspected an autoimmune disorder, but repeated testing offered no clear answers. Eventually, a diagnosis emerged: Babesiosis, an infection caused by the parasite Babesia. The parasite had entered her bloodstream and was attacking her red blood cells, triggering severe fatigue, nerve pain, and a compromised immune system.

“It quickly became clear that this wasn’t something I could fix with a balanced diet or exercise,” she explained. As her body continued to break down, the full scale of the infection remained unclear until everything changed again that fall.

A Tick Bite, Babesia, and the Silent Spread

Though she was finally given a name for her illness, Palen’s condition continued to spiral. In early October 2024, while visiting family in Texas, she started feeling pain in her tailbone and running unexplained fevers. She initially dismissed the symptoms, assuming they were part of the same tick-related illness.

But by Monday of that week, she could barely sit through a brief work meeting. Her fever spiked, her body weakened, and standing became nearly impossible. When an ambulance was called, she hesitated, concerned about the cost, but eventually agreed to go to the hospital.

There, after receiving pain medication, she began to lose sensation in her legs. The numbness started in her left leg, then spread to her right, and continued upward to her abdomen. A spinal tap revealed that her spinal fluid was flooded with white blood cells, a sign of inflammation in the spinal cord.

Doctors couldn’t reach a consensus on what was causing the damage, though some suspected it was linked to Lyme disease. Palen’s paralysis marked a dramatic escalation in a health crisis that had been quietly building for months.

The root cause traced back to a tick bite — something so small, it likely went unnoticed. The infection it triggered, babesiosis, is caused by microscopic parasites from the Babesia family, which are transmitted through the bite of infected blacklegged ticks.

In Palen’s case, the illness was aggressive. It depleted her immune system, left her in chronic pain, and caused her body to shut down. What made her situation more complicated was the lack of medical consensus. Even after extensive testing, some specialists doubted that Lyme disease or babesiosis alone could account for the severity of her condition.

Transverse Myelitis and a Life-Changing Diagnosis

During her stay in the hospital in Austin, Palen’s condition continued to deteriorate rapidly. Unable to walk or urinate, her state was life-threatening. Over the next several days, doctors conducted further testing and imaging. What they found was inflammation in her spinal cord, a condition known as Transverse Myelitis.

The infection had taken a toll on her nervous system, and the neurological damage had left her paralyzed from the waist down. Though a 15-day course of IV antibiotics cleared the infection from her system, the intervention came too late to prevent lasting harm.

According to her GoFundMe page, doctors gave her a 33 percent chance of full recovery, a 33 percent chance of partial recovery, and a 33 percent chance of no recovery at all.

After spending five weeks in the hospital, Palen was transferred to a rehabilitation center to begin physical therapy. She had lost not only her mobility but also her independence. With her savings depleted and no source of income, she was forced to leave her apartment and move in with family in Texas.

Still, Palen was determined to fight her way back. She began sharing her experience publicly, not for sympathy, but to raise awareness of the illness that changed her life and the slow, painful recovery that lay ahead.

Rehabilitation, Relocation, and a New Reality

At the rehabilitation center, Palen began the slow process of rebuilding her strength. For someone who once thrived on long runs and back-to-back workouts, the change in pace was jarring. She had entered a new world, where small, routine tasks had become her biggest hurdles.

Eventually, she was released into outpatient care and began receiving in-home physical therapy. By then, her life had changed in every possible way. She had lost the financial stability she had worked so hard to maintain.

As medical bills piled up and disability paperwork was delayed or lost, she leaned on family support and a growing community of online followers to get through the days.

A GoFundMe campaign launched in January 2025 raised over $12,000 to help with her medical expenses, which had already exceeded $50,000 from the hospital stay alone. The campaign’s organizer wrote that Palen’s savings were gone and she had not received any disability income in the four months since her paralysis.

Yet even in financial strain and physical hardship, Palen remained open about her experience. In a post from early January, she explained how even the simplest actions, such as making a salad, balancing ingredients on her lap, and staying seated long enough to finish the task, now required careful planning and effort.

She reflected on how her definition of a challenge had shifted. “Now,” she wrote, “the challenges look completely different.” No longer measuring her days by steps taken or miles logged, she had come to see value in the small victories that now marked her progress.

Medical Context: What to Know About Babesiosis

Babesiosis (pronounced buh-BEE-zee-oh-sis) is primarily transmitted through the bite of the same type of tick known to spread Lyme disease. While many people exposed to Babesia may not experience symptoms, the infection can become severe and even life-threatening, especially for individuals with weakened immune systems.

Symptoms typically appear one to four weeks after exposure and may include high fever, fatigue, chills, muscle or joint aches, headache, loss of appetite, and coughing. Notably, babesiosis does not usually produce a rash, which makes it more difficult to identify than some other tick-borne diseases.

For some, it mimics a mild flu; for others, like Palen, the illness can spiral into a full-body health crisis. According to the Cleveland Clinic, fewer than 3,000 cases are reported annually in the United States. However, the true number may be higher due to underreporting and misdiagnosis.

Babesiosis is most commonly found in seven U.S. states: Connecticut, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin. Still, isolated cases have been documented in other regions, including the West Coast.

The illness is most prevalent during the spring and summer months, when young ticks known as nymphs are most active. These nymphs are about the size of a poppy seed and are easily overlooked, making it more likely for them to go unnoticed until they’ve transmitted the infection.

Though early detection and treatment with antibiotics can effectively clear the infection, complications arise when diagnosis is delayed. In severe cases, Babesia can lead to hemolytic anemia, organ failure, or neurological conditions, like the spinal inflammation that left Palen partially paralyzed.

Fighting for Progress: Small Wins, Big Strength

By December 2024, Palen began noticing signs of improvement. After months without movement below her waist, she was finally able to move one leg slightly. It wasn’t much, but for someone who was told she might never walk again, it was a turning point.

With continued therapy, she’s since been able to take side steps and build core strength, even though key functions like bending her knees remain out of reach due to a lack of quadriceps activity. She described these milestones as hard-won and fragile, achieved through daily physical therapy and relentless patience.

While the timeline for nerve healing remains uncertain, her focus is on what she can do and the belief that more recovery is still possible. Mentally, staying hopeful has been just as important as the physical work. Palen has been candid about the emotional toll of losing control over her body, especially after dedicating years to health and fitness.

“The most frustrating part is that I did all the right things,” she said. “I took advantage of my life… I treated my body so well.” Yet even amid lingering uncertainty, she remains committed to forward movement. “I have to be hopeful,” she said. “If not, I feel like mentally I would spiral.”

That mindset, along with the support from her online community and rehabilitation team, continues to carry her through the slow process of recovery.