Right before Thanksgiving in 2023, Shannon Finnegan Cook, a 31-year-old attorney and mother of two young children, came down with what seemed like a typical cold. It was unremarkable, as her three-year-old and nine-month-old sons were in daycare and often brought germs home. The cold lingered for one week, and then another. Thanksgiving came and went, and by the Friday following the holiday, she developed a headache that simply would not go away.
"I feel like my brain is too big for my skull," she remembers telling her husband, Matthew.
She went to bed to try to sleep off her fever and noticed her left hand starting to tingle. When she woke up Saturday morning, her fever still hadn't broken, and she decided with her husband to go to the emergency department at her local hospital in the Philadelphia suburbs.
When Cook left her home, she was able to walk and get into the car on her own. By the time they reached the hospital, she needed a wheelchair and assistance to maneuver out of the vehicle.
"If we had waited even a few minutes to leave our house, I don't know how I would have got her to the car and to the hospital," her husband recalled. "She declined so fast."
Within hours, Cook had transferred to the Penn's Neuro Intensive Care Unit at The Clifton Center for Medical Breakthroughs at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, where she would stay for three weeks in a coma.
Over the next three months, a multidisciplinary team at Penn Medicine provided near constant care as they diagnosed and treated a rare and deadly neurological illness that few patients survive.
