Bitten A Tick Survivor's Warning About the Growing Tick Crisis

When Jennifer Saterdal was nine years old, the doctors gave her one day to live. Her brother got two. They were in a Florida hospital and the medical system had run out of answers. It was not a doctor who saved them. It was their grandmother, Beverly Shavers, who walked into that hospital with a magazine article about Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever when everyone else had given up.

Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever nearly wiped out two children in 1984. Forty years later it is still being missed, still being misdiagnosed, and still killing people. It is one of the most dangerous tick-borne diseases in the United States and most people have never heard of it.

Bitten is that story and a warning about what is happening right now.

Ticks are carrying more than Lyme disease. They are carrying Alpha-Gal Syndrome, a food allergy to red meat that killed its first American victim in 2025. They are carrying Powassan virus, which transmits in fifteen minutes and has no treatment. A Congressional investigation is currently underway into whether the United States government weaponized ticks. And the first Lyme disease vaccine in twenty-four years is seeking FDA approval at the same moment tick populations are at record highs.

This book will tell you what ticks are carrying, where they hide, how to remove them, what symptoms to watch for, and what to say to your doctor. It will also tell you the story of one family's survival and the grandmother who refused to brush it off.

Pay attention. Don't brush it off.