For a week or so, Ashley Lunardini felt an intermittent pain in her neck. She also had a dull headache that wouldn't go away. She'd had neck pain before, but headaches were rare.
Overall, she was in excellent health. At 39, she went to Pilates class three times a week, walked every day and ate healthy meals. She went to see her primary care physician.
She didn't see anything wrong. Thinking Lunardini's discomfort could be caused by a nerve, the doctor gave her a prescription for pain medicine. That evening, Lunardini became nauseous and dizzy.
She assumed it was a reaction to the medication. The next morning, a Friday, she felt fine. After a quick trip to the grocery store, she pulled into her driveway.
Steering toward the garage, she became so dizzy she had to stop the car. Soon after, she was fine. A half hour later, the vision in her left eye started to blur.
Before long, it cleared up. "Something is really weird," she told her husband, Tim Barlog. A pub in their Chicago neighborhood was having a dog-friendly event that evening, and the couple wanted to take Ruby, their dachshund-beagle mix.
Lunardini had noted that Ruby had followed her everywhere all week and whined when she was away – things the dog never did. At the pub, she stayed under Lunardini's chair, again out of character. Back home an hour later, the couple was about to order a pizza when Lunardini suddenly felt a surge of electricity course through her body.
"Something's not right," she told Barlog. "What is.
