- I was in a fetal position for days.

I was having blinding headaches.

I was just in desperate condition and getting worse.

- [Michelle] Harvey Perry's love of nature nearly cost him his life.

18 years ago, he found a bullseye rash similar to this one on his arm, which is a classic symptom of Lyme disease.

- And I felt like, well, I've got Lyme disease.

It's about time I did.

Other people have been getting it and I'm out in the woods all the time.

So I went and got treated for that with doxycycline and cleared it right up.

- [Michelle] But a few weeks later, he collapsed at his home in Westerly.

- I woke up on the kitchen floor.

I fainted without realizing I was faint.

I thought that was weird.

And it happened to me again the next morning.

And I went to the emergency room and they said, "Oh, you must have babesiosis too."

- It turns out one tick bite had infected Perry with three diseases, including anaplasmosis, which kills your white blood cells.

It took two trips to the emergency room before his medical team realized the full extent of what was wrong.

Take me back to when you were in the hospital.

Did you have a moment amidst the hallucinations when you thought, "I could die"?

- Oh, absolutely.

I started, in fact, one time my wife came in and I said, "I think we need to be talking about funeral plans, 'cause I don't know where this thing is going."

I mean, my liver's already shut down.

Well, I don't know what else is gonna shut down.

And she cried and we talked about it.

- [Michelle] Fortunately, a combination of antibiotics has set Perry on a path to recovery.

He no longer deals with symptoms, but he's never forgotten how close he came to losing his life all because of a tick bite.

- We're seeing the tick population increase here in Rhode Island because of the weather changes that we're experiencing.

- [Michelle] Dr. Philip Chan is an infectious diseases specialist at the Rhode Island Department of Health.

(phone ringing) - This is Dr. Chan.

- [Michelle] He says warmer, wetter weather creates an environment more hospitable for ticks.

- In general, a tick has to be attached usually for longer than 48 hours in order to transmit a lot of these diseases, including Lyme disease.

So if you can find it soon and remove it, you are gonna really minimize your risk.

- [Michelle] While most people try to avoid ticks, Thomas Mather makes it his business to find them.

- That's a nymphal blacklegged tick.

- [Michelle] He's the director of the University of Rhode Island Center for Vector-borne Disease and its TickEncounter resource center.

- [Thomas] Lovely.

- [Michelle] Mather's seen how the tick population in Rhode Island has evolved throughout his three decades at URI.

- What's really changed here in Rhode Island, and probably New England, is that white-tailed deer have just become more of a backyard entity.

- [Michelle] Deer are the primary reproductive host for ticks.

So as deer move to more suburban areas, ticks go with them.

- They take a blood meal, they grow 100 times in size, they'd fall off, they lay thousands of eggs, those eggs hatch, and that's where the problem really starts.

- [Michelle] That problem includes a relatively new type of tick to Rhode Island called the lone star tick.

The adult female has a white dot or lone star on her back.

- This is a nymph lone star tick.

In the last few years, we've seen large increases along most of the coastal areas of the state.

- [Michelle] A bite from this blood sucking lone star tick can cause people to develop an allergy to red meat called alpha-gal syndrome.

And these ticks are spreading across the country.

- Today, the Centers for Disease Control is warning about a potentially life-threatening red meat allergy caused by tick bites.

- [Michelle] Mather says nearly all lone star ticks are carrying the sugar molecule, alpha-gal.

Meanwhile, he says about one in four of the blacklegged ticks or deer ticks in Rhode Island is carrying the bacteria for Lyme disease during the nymphal stage.

Even more carry it as adults.

I followed along as Mather looked for ticks along the edge of a backyard in North Kingstown.

- When we show people what nymphal stage ticks look like, they don't have any idea.

- I was not expecting it to be that small.

- Most people would just completely dismiss that as a speck, right?

Well, that speck is a tick, and if you don't find it and it's attached for a day or a day and a half, it has a high likelihood of making you sick.

- [Michelle] Emily Levy knows that all too well.

She says her life was altered by a tick bite she never saw, a rash that never came, and a doctor who did not diagnose her properly.

- So some days I would have a migraine.

Other days it'd be pain in my legs.

Some days it would be neuropathy, GI tract issues.

Chronic fatigue was pretty much throughout.

- [Michelle] She started to feel sick when she was in middle school.

She made numerous trips to the hospital throughout her senior year of high school and college.

It took seven years for her to get an accurate diagnosis.

She had Lyme disease and a number of other tick-borne illnesses.

- That was really challenging as a young adult because I knew something was wrong with me, but I also felt like my concerns weren't being taken seriously by the authority figures or medical professionals in my life.

- [Michelle] She says her symptoms are in remission, but she lived with a PICC line, a peripherally inserted central catheter, on and off for a few years to deliver medication into her bloodstream.

A nurse recommended she use a cut off sock to cover it.

Levy later went on to have a port in her chest.

It inspired her and two of her friends to launch Mighty Well, a company that sells PICC covers and other medical products.

- The whole idea is a patient's external medical tubing can be kept secured, safe, sanitary.

- [Michelle] Levy's grateful for everything she's learned from her tick-borne illnesses, but she says her health outcomes could have been different had she been tested for those diseases sooner.

- I think it could have been treated very quickly if the doctor just knew.

I mean, we lived on a lake.

We had so many deer in our backyard.

None of that about the environment we lived in was ever questioned or taken into consideration.

- [Michelle] Entomologist Thomas Mather hopes he can spare many others from the devastating effects of ticks.

Using funding from the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, he's involved in a New England study that's analyzing the best ways for people to protect themselves against ticks.

- If you have a residential yard where you see deer on a regular basis, you have chipmunks and mice running around, then you're probably a good candidate for doing tick management in your own backyard as well.

- [Michelle] Mather also recommends that people spray their shoes with an insecticide called permethrin to repel ticks.

- The nymphal ticks are down in the leaf litter.

They get on your shoes and then crawl up your legs.

So there's a good, easy to do, once a month, spray your shoes with permethrin spray.

- Back in Westerly, Harvey Perry says he's opposed to spraying his property because of the effect it has on the environment.

Instead, he wears clothes treated with permethrin when he's doing work outside.

At any point, did you think maybe it's worth moving and not living in a wooded area?

- That's my life.

That's what I enjoy the most, is getting out in nature and managing nature for native plants and wildlife.

- [Michelle] Perry says this isn't a view he's willing to give up.

- I'm determined that I'm not gonna let them change my life that way.

I just protect myself so that I can do what I want to do.

(gentle music)