Carrie Jones

Oct 04, 2025

The Bar Harbor Story is generously sponsored by Choco-Latté Café.

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BAR HARBOR—Ken Colburn came close to dying this past month and he wants everyone to know about it.

That’s not because he wants sympathy or empathy, but because he desperately wants to do two things. His first goal is to keep other people from going through what he went through. His second goal is to really and truly thank all the people who helped him survive.

“On Friday, August 15, 2025, I enjoyed a lovely afternoon engaged in my second favorite activity (after bicycling)—cutting, limbing, and stacking wood at an idyllic little waterfront lot we own in Downeast Maine,” the Bar Harbor man wrote.

Ticks are common in wood work. Ken knew that. He’d come down with two tick borne diseases before: anaplasmosis in July 2024 and Lyme disease in July 2025.

He does thorough tick checks.

He took a break in the sun on that beautiful day, sitting in the kind of light that makes everything crystal clear, focused, and sharp. That’s when he saw them. Ken was wearing an InsectShield base underlayer. His gloves he said were infused with chainsaw oil. The ticks, however, were right there on his hand, three of them.

He went to work immediately.

“I removed them and dispatched them promptly and thought no more of it,” he said.

They were the size of poppy seeds, his wife, Jacquie said.

They’d likely been there for an hour or two at the most.

“That was long enough,” he said.

Ken Colburn is the kind of man in his early seventies who presents like he’s a fit man two decades younger than his true chronological age. He’d been training for a bicycle trip this summer, putting in 500 miles, capable of riding the entirety of the Park Loop Road two times in a row. His fitness likely helped him in a battle for his life.

Ken had been infected by a tick—poppy sized, hard to see though he likely saw it—and inside that tick was a parasite, most likely Babesia microti.

If the tick holding it is tiny, the parasite is even smaller. These parasites make their homes in red blood cells and reproduce. Once the parasite matures, it pops out of the host’s red blood cell and infects other cells.

If just 1 percent of a person like Ken’s red blood cells are infected, it equates to more than 200 billion parasites.

For some, there are no symptoms. For most infected, Babesiosis feels like the flu. For Ken, it felt a lot worse.

Even in acute infections, a patient can have no symptoms for a long time. That makes the diagnosis delayed and it gives the parasites time to breed. One becomes two becomes dozens, hundreds, billions.

The infection is most common in places where Lyme disease is prevalent. That’s because the black-legged deer tick carries both. Lyme, however, is treated by penicillin. That doesn’t work on parasites.

Kenneth Colburn is know around Mount Desert Island as being an active man. Bicycling, rowing, working in that wood lot have given him a strong core. His family, curiosity and heart have given him a strong mind and a will to survive.

“I got worse and worse and worse,” he said.

For Ken, he began feeling progressively worse the week after he found those ticks. He ran a fever of 101-102 Farenheit for five days.

He had a doctor’s appointment that he’d already had scheduled for August 25.

“I chose to wait for that appointment, which may have been an unwise delay,” he said.

A few days before, he had blood labs taken, which is standard. When his doctor, Dr Tanya Hanke, checked him out, she prescribed doxycycline, an antibiotic that takes care of most tick-borne disease like Lyme.

She did one other thing though. She also drew a “tick panel” to see if he had Lyme or something else.

“One of the big thank-yous is to Tanya and her colleague Holly Bailey,” he said. “She recognizes the signature of tick borne infection.”

He had Lyme disease, but that wasn’t all he had.

Everyone expected Ken to feel better soon. However, two days later, on August 27, he was a lot worse. Jacquie brought him to Mount Desert Island Hospital’s emergency room.

The ER staff agreed that Ken had a tick borne disease, but they also gave him a chest Xray and CT scan. That showed two small kidney stones that had passed and a gallstone, but no cancer, no other obvious culprits to make Ken so sick.

That same night, the tick panel results came in, with a lucky two-day turnover instead of the typical three-to-five days.

“They showed that I had contracted Babesiosis as well as Lyme disease. Unattended anaplasmosis and Lyme disease can have lots of serious long-term impacts to humans, but Babesiosis is the one that can kill you,” Ken explained.

They changed his medicine immediately, but, he said, it was too little too late and two days later, on August 30, he was jaundiced.

The parasites had too much of a head start. They were destroying Ken’s red blood cells, hurting his liver and he said, “making mincemeat of my kidneys.”

Jacquie brought him back to the hospital’s emergency room. It was Saturday of Labor Day weekend. The island was busy. The hospital was busy. And the ER stabilized him, but realized quickly that he needed to be in an advanced hospital setting. There was a bed at Northern Light-Eastern Maine Medical Center. The challenge was how to get him there.

“Gordon Murphy and Kristen Nealy at MDI, they just did wonderful work,” Ken said.

Ambulances were busy throughout the region and anticipating rescue calls.

But the MDI Hospital’s staff in the ER kept trying. They went through the list of ambulance services and called everyone. Then they went through the list again.

They were another big thank you.

“Kristen called like 25 places,” Ken said.

Then, Bar Harbor Fire Department’s ambulance team said they could take Ken to Bangor, a journey that lasted approximately 75 minutes just one way.

Paul Gilfedder and JR Gray on the ambulance drove Ken to Bangor.

“They basically saved my butt,” he said.

“They did,” Jacquie agreed.

“I’ve never been a lengthy stay in a hospital. It was an education for me. I came to realize your comfort is not the point. Your healing is the point,” Ken said. “The doctors were amazing.”

The nurses were too.

“Nurses are not assistants. They are the lubrication that makes the whole system work,” Ken said.

And when they were in that Bangor hospital meeting with the team of specialists, they realized just how dire Ken’s situation was.

One of the doctors said, “We’re trying to keep him alive long enough to fight this virus.”

“That’s not exactly what you want to hear.”

Jacquie said that when the doctors left the room, what had been said hit her and she thought, “Whoah, okay, it’s really that serious.”

It was.

Ken’s creatinine levels (a waste product filtered by the kidneys) was meant to be between 0.7-1.3 mg/dL. His was 9.6.

“They have low levels and they have high. They have a third category called critical,” Ken said. That was him.

They launched him into dialysis and he had four treatments at the hospital.

“At the last one of those I had a really emotional moment,” Ken said. The original doctor who first saw him in Bangor came in and grabbed Ken’s hand.

“You’re parasite free,” the doctor told him.

“Nobody has ever said anything nicer to me,” Ken said, remembering, his eyes a bit wet.

Even when he was released from the hospital, Ken’s health journey wasn’t quite done. He had more dialysis treatment throughout September. The outpatient service was at DaVita Eastern Maine Dialysis in Ellsworth. He raves about them. He has recovery. He’s gone from being so weak that he had to use a walker to strong enough to sit up, to walk, to move. He still has a catheter in his chest, but that will be gone soon. In the short amount of time from August 15 to October 1, Ken, who was not a man with much—if any—extra weight has lost 20 pounds.

He’s still thankful. Thankful for his doctor, for the team at MDI Hospital and Bangor, for the Bar Harbor Fire Department’s ambulance crew, for the medical professionals at Davita.

But a really big component of his thanks goes to his family. His kids don’t live here but they took turns, passing each other in the Bangor Airport. His daughter Kaity and daughter-in-law Ramya came, helped Jacquie, made food, helped prepare his home for him, made sure that Jacquie didn’t have to do it all alone. His son, David, who is a brain surgeon, was the final helper, preparing the house for winter, taking care of things that Ken always does. Ken’s brother, another clinician, provided medical support, too.

He’s so thankful for them, too.

“Anaplasmosis and Lyme can have profound human impacts; B is the one who can kill you,” Ken said. It does with multi-system organ failure. Ken had renal failure and hemolysis. He began to have multi-system organ decline.

But Ken survived.

“Thank goodness everybody was aware enough,” he said of the hospital staff and his doctor.

Most people only think of Lyme disease when they think of illnesses that have to do with ticks, but in the last ten years, the incidences of Babesiosis has increased by 1,422% in Maine, from 9 in 2011 to 138 in 2019 and 319 cases so far in 2025. The first known human case was in Croatia in 1957, when a young farmer died of it due to it causing renal insufficiency. Unlike Lyme disease, it does not cause a rash.

“Even though this is newer to all of us. Thank heavens we live in an area where our medical professionals know enough what to do to treat you,” Jacquie said. “If we had been on a vacation somewhere?” She wonders what would have happened.

Dr. Rico Leonardo Lizbinski is presenting a paper about Ken’s case. And in the abstract for the paper, it mentions what helps people like Ken to survive: coordinated multidisciplinary management, timely escalation of antimicrobial and adjunct therapy.

But Ken’s brother thinks that a couple of things were left out in that list.

“Spousal awareness and advocacy, family support, and prior conditioning are also critical,” Ken said. “Had it not been for Jacquie—if your spouse isn’t recognizing and acting—this could have been a very different outcome.”

He’s had a come-to-Jesus moment, he said. He wants to travel with Jacquie more, write his life story for his kids, maybe spend a bit less time up in that wood lot.

“There’s no time like the present,” Jacquie said.

Ken nodded and they exchanged a look, Ken sitting on the couch in their Bar Harbor home, Jacquie perched on a chair, having dealt with her own health crisis last year. As their cat wound under the dining room table, the air shifted. Ken’s eyes got a little bit wet again, and then he smiled. She smiled back.

They were together. They were healing. And they were thankful. And maybe, they hoped, they could get the word out a bit more so that if someone else gets infected, they’ll get treatment early and soon, so that they can be thankful for a community and family that supported them, too.

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MORE ABOUT BABESIOSIS

According to a Columbia University Irving Medical Center, “In immunocompetent patients, symptoms of Babesiosis usually begin one to six weeks after inoculation and are non-specific. Typical early manifestations include intermittent fevers accompanied by fatigue and malaise, headache, chills, and myalgias. Nausea, vomiting, reduced appetite, and depression can also occur. Some patients will develop enlarged livers or spleens. The usual disease course lasts weeks to several months, but some patients take even longer to fully recover. Co-infection with Lyme disease or anaplasmosis may complicate the clinical presentation and predispose the patient to more severe disease.

“At the greatest risk for severe Babesiosis are the elderly, asplenetic patients, patients with HIV or malignancies, and patients on immunosuppressive medications. In these populations, the disease course is longer and the fatality rate is in the neighborhood of 20%, even with proper anti-Babesial therapy. The most common serious complication of Babesiosis is acute respiratory failure, but heart failure, liver and renal failure, disseminated intravascular coagulation, and coma are also well-recognized severe manifestations of Babesiosis.”

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, symptoms include:

• Fever
• Chills
• Sweats
• Headache
• Body aches
• Loss of appetite
• Nausea
• Fatigue

All photos courtesy of Ken and Jacqui Colburn.

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