Narrator: Kalee Prue is a health-conscious, single mom from Connecticut, who enjoyed being active.
I already had a pretty healthy lifestyle. I was a step along the way of what I thought was improving my health.
I used to ride my bike for several hours a day with, um, my son in his bike seat, I was in pretty good shape.
Ate all organic food, I didn’t take medication.
Narrator: Kalee had trouble digesting lactose and read that drinking raw milk would help her digest dairy better.
Narrator: She expected raw milk to improve her health and bought her first quart of raw cow’s milk at a health food store.
Narrator: Two or three days after finishing the milk, Kalee began to get sick.
Narrator: Stomach cramping led to vomiting and soon, she was too weak to care for her 18 month old son.
Um, I was falling against the walls and stuff and I realized how weak I was, and this had gone on for probably a week and a half total of this intense stomach cramping, I think I lost about 20 pounds.
Um, I couldn’t keep anything down, so I figured I must be really dehydrated and maybe I should go to a clinic.
After about an hour there, they had given me, um, two very large IV bags of uh, saline and I still did not have to pee,
um, so they were very concerned and realized that my kidneys were shutting down and were almost completely non-functional at that point.
Narrator: Kalee had developed an
I ended up with my blood basically destroying itself and my kidneys could not process it and my kidneys were becoming clogged and, um, they start to shut down.
So I ended up having to have over 20 treatments of um, plasmapheresis, which is a sort of a dialysis where they take all of your blood out and they process it through this machine.
They separate the plasma out of it and put in donor plasma.
And, um, by the time my treatment was done, I had over 400 different donors worth of plasma.
Narrator: Over several months, Kalee’s condition slowly improved.
I’ve recovered better than a lot of people do, um, when they it get as bad as I did, but my, uh, my kidney function is still not normal.
My blood pressure is still very high for somebody my age and in the health that I was in previous.
Narrator: Kalee believes there are a lot of misconceptions about foodborne illness and that people don’t realize how serious it can be.
You know, I had heard, heard of food poisoning, they talk about it in the news, an outbreak of this, an outbreak of that, and you don’t really know what that means.
You think of it as like I said getting a stomach ache for a couple of days.
Um, you know, it’s within just your scope of your experiences and to most people, being sick means a couple days out of work.
Um. Never, never, never would I have thought that, you know, what you eat can kill you.
Narrator: Kalee drank raw milk because she thought it was a healthy choice, but after her health battles, she knows better.
You have to make good choices and you need to think about the consequences.
You have to weigh risks.
And on some things, I do believe that they are beneficial in a natural form but you know, something that comes out this close to a cow’s rear end, I don’t think it’s worth the risk.