Georgia mother dies from mysterious disease causing brain inflammation

Stefanie Ballard began feeling sick after a day at the pool.

A Georgia mother dismissed her sickness as a summertime flu; now she has passed away from a cardiac arrest, leaving her husband and their two daughters behind. Stefanie Ballard is believed to have contracted the disease after spending time with her children in the pool and felt the sickness would go away the next day. Unfortunately, her brain began swelling from causes still undetermined.

MUNTINLUPA, PHILIPPINES (Catholic Online) - "I wish I had better news, but the sad truth is that the swelling in Stef's brain did not respond to treatment and continued to spread to the point where she went into cardiac arrest yesterday afternoon," wrote her husband, Pete Ballard, on the GoFundMe page he set up for her.

Ballard fell sick mid-July after spending a day at the pool with daughters Riley, 6, and Reese, 4. Her husband recalled Ballard thought she was experiencing a summertime flu, but the next morning she was feeling dizzy and nauseous and started exhibiting aches and losing her balance, although her fever did go away.

"We took her to the ER at Piedmont Hospital where they were able to rule out stroke or aneurysm, and identified significant brain inflamation [sic] as the cause of her symptoms," he added, according to The Daily Mail. During his interview with MyFoxAtlanta, Mr. Ballard explained that Ballard's immune system was attacking her brain, confusing it for a virus or a foreign element that it felt needed to eradicate out of the body.

However, this led her brain to swell and lose muscle control completely on the right side, while the left side was left with significant impairment.

Unfortunately, Ballard suffered from a stroke following a GoFundMe page update on Thursday that she felt "really weak" on her left side.

"Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God." 2 Corinthians 1:3-4

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