A brawny 17-year-old nature-lover was following his mother into their house in Poughkeepsie, New York, when he collapsed on the lawn in 2013.
Hours later, Joseph Elone was dead, according to Medium's interviews with his family.
Joseph had spent a month in the woods a week prior, doing a prestigious environmental fellowship. He loved the experience so much he already wanted to come back in the fall to go to Brown University.
But instead, he brought something back to Poughkeepsie with him: a tick.
That invisible passenger from the environment he so loved would be the death of him - though doctors wouldn't know it until months after the bright high school student had died.
Joseph had developed Lyme carditis, a rare - although likely under-diagnosed - complication of a bite from an infected tick.
At least nine other people have died from the hard-to-detect heart infection in the US, but it may be set to surge as the warming climate makes more regions of the US fertile breeding ground for infected ticks.
Joseph Elone (pictured) was one of just nine known fatalities from Lyme carditis, a life-threatening heart infection that develops after bites from infected ticks in rare cases
Joseph grew up in tick country.
Poughkeepsie isn't far from the center of the cluster of Northeastern counties of the US where Lyme disease cases are most concentrated.
If Poughkeepsie is central, though, Rhode Island is at the heart of Lyme country.
Every year, 30,000 new cases of the tickborne disease are confirmed in the US, and that number is climbing steadily.
Most of those can be eradicated with a couple weeks of antibiotics. Some are cured after a longer course of the bacteria killing drugs, and a handful of patients are left with long-term symptoms even after the disease is no longer detectable with blood tests.
And for an exceedingly small percentage - about one percent - the devastating Lyme bacteria sneak into the tissues of the vital organs, most devastatingly, the heart.
Some cases of Lyme carditis clear up with antibiotic treatment, as Lyme does.
In other instances, Lyme isn't detected in the first place and goes untreated with life-threatening costs.
After developing mild symptoms like a low-grade fever, achiness, fatigue gastrointestinal symptoms, cough and sore throat, Joseph paid a
