She narrowly survived hantavirus 30 years ago. Here’s what it was like.

Shaina Montiel still remembers the ambulance ride.

At the age of 5, Montiel had felt sick for about a week, right around Halloween. She'd been vomiting frequently and had abdominal pain. At first, her doctor told her family it was just the flu. But as her symptoms worsened and the antibiotics she'd been prescribed didn't do much, it became clear something else was going on.

Montiel's parents eventually took her to a hospital where a different doctor figured out the truth: Montiel had hantavirus − and needed to get to a children's hospital for supportive care and close monitoring, immediately.

Montiel says her mother stills cries thinking about her harrowing experience with hantavirus, which, according to the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, can have a fatality rate up to 38%, depending on the type of syndrome caused by it. At the time of her infection, Montiel says one of her doctors remarked that she was the youngest patient they'd seen yet survive the virus.

"My mom tells me that she remembers, when they did send me to the ambulance, that she was letting me know that, 'We're going to see you, but there's a possibility that you might wake up and be in heaven,' " Montiel says. "And I was like, 'OK, that's fine. I'm fine with that. I want to go to heaven.'"

Now 38, Montiel says it's been surreal watching the little-known virus that almost took her life three decades ago make international headlines over the past week, as a deadly hantavirus outbreak on a cruise ship has stoked fear around the world. By sharing her own story, Montiel hopes she can help others both understand the gravity of a hantavirus infection, while keeping anxiety about far-reaching spread in perspective. In a May 7 media briefing, the World Health Organization said that "while this is a serious incident, WHO assesses the public health risk as low."

"When I caught it, nobody else in my family caught it," Montiel says. "There's nobody else in my neighborhood that caught it. So I think I was just very unlucky."

She thought it was just the flu. It was hantavirus.

Montiel's parents realized something was seriously amiss when their daughter had such severe fatigue, she could no longer walk. They took her to more doctors, but they all maintained it was just the flu. One night, Montiel's mother awoke to find her daughter's bedsheets red with blood − a result of hemorrhaging and bloody diarrhea, caused by the virus.

Per the CDC, there's still no treatment for hantavirus. When Montiel had it, doctors could only provide supportive care, as her body either fought off the virus, or succumbed to it. Thankfully, she fought it off, but it wasn't easy.

Her body was swollen. She had a painful rash. It took a week of hospitalization before she finally felt normal again. Doctors told her family they couldn't believe she survived.

"My mom said that the doctor ended up crying before I left, because he was like, 'You're a miracle. Miracles happen every day, and you are a miracle,'" Montiel says.

Thirty years later, the shadow of hantavirus still looms over Montiel's life. It gave her a phobia of vomiting. It also gave her health anxiety − a lingering dread that, one day, either the hantavirus, or some other deadly pathogen, will infect her again.

"Even as a child, I was always afraid it was going to come back or that I was going to die by 10-years-old," she says. "I just was always afraid that, because I went through that, I wasn't supposed to make it. So I was just waiting for something bad to happen, because I knew, 'OK, you were supposed to die during that time.'"

The fear of hantavirus lingers

Montiel isn't totally sure how she caught hantavirus, which is primarily contracted via exposure to the urine, droppings or saliva of rodents. She thinks she likely got it playing in the backyard.

"At the hospital, my mom, she had no idea what this virus was," Montiel says. "She had never heard of it. So she was like, 'I'm always so careful of the kids. What did I do wrong?' And they told her, 'You did nothing wrong. This is something that's spread through rodents.' And we were outside all the time, and we live in an area where there's a lot of wildlife and nature kind of close to the hills."

Six years after the onset of COVID-19, some on social media have likened hantavirus to the coronavirus, speculating that it too may cause a pandemic. Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, director of the WHO’s Department of Epidemic and Pandemic Management, said that isn't going to happen. “This is not the start of an epidemic," she stated in a recent hantavirus briefing. "This is not the start of a pandemic."

Montiel believes that's true, though she understands why some have anxiety around hantavirus.

"It's so surreal, because growing up, I wanted to learn more about the hantavirus," she says. "To see people talking about it, it's just so strange. It's like I'm in another dimension or something. I just can't believe it's in headlines, because it's such a rare virus."