Hi. My name is Billy Jestice and I am a survivor of viral western equine encephalitis. Back in 1978, I was 26 years old and a jockey at La Mesa Park in Raton, New Mexico. A mosquito bit me on my arm and it had swollen to where it looked like Popeye's arm. I went to see a doctor about it, but he only gave me cortisone and sent me home. About two months later, I began getting sick. After around three days of being bedridden, I made it to my landlady's home, and asked her to take me to the hospital. At the county hospital, without even checking me out or taking any kind of blood tests, they called the sheriff to come and get me and take me to the insane asylum. They said I was just crazy. The sheriff came and on the way, I told him that I wasn't crazy, that I was just sick. He believed me, but there was nothing he could do. After about a week in the insane asylum, a doctor was making his rounds and saw me and immediately sent me to the hospital in Pueblo, Colorado. I was in isolation on an ice blanket
for four weeks because my fever ran so high. They had to tie my arms down, because I kept yanking out my I.V. I slipped into a coma after about the first two weeks I was there.
They gave me 15 spinal taps into crushed vertebrae in my back, and I screamed each time. But the doctors and I didn't know they were crushed at the time. The crushed vertebrae were a result of a horse accident. During my stay in the hospital, I had horrible nightmares that I was in a junkyard with a fence around it and little demons were guarding me and if a friend tried to come to break me out, a little demon would kill them and eat them. They looked like a little Tasmanian devil kind of thing. One would stay on the end of my bed. It wouldn't hurt me, but it would kill anyone who came near. All of my skin peeled off of my body, and my hair fell out of my head. I don't know whether it was from my high fever or antibiotics they had given me.
After my release, my parents took me back home to Arkansas. I am 5'7" and when I was released from the hospital I weighed 87 lbs. As a result of lying on the ice blanket for that amount of time caused me to catch pneumonia and I had to have lung surgery. The bottom lobe of my left lung had collapsed. Scar tissue was wrapped around it so they had to go into it and peel it off like you would an orange.
About a year later, I was back to riding race horses again. I did have a stuttering speech problem for about four or five years afterwards. And to this day, I am extremely sensitive to bright lights and sharp noises. My concentration is not very good, and I do tend to have headaches a lot. I am now 50 years old and am doing fine. I have no major health problems from the encephalitis. I was told that I had a 40/60% chance of recovery. Well, I guess, God wasn't finished with me, because I'm still here and now have two wonderful children and a beautiful wife.
I tried to sue the county hospital for negligence, but I found out you can't sue a county hospital. I could have died in the asylum with no family around and no one to know the wiser.
This is a cool site, I have never got to read others cases about Encephalitis.
