The numbness started in her feet. Elizabeth Pehota didn’t think much of it. She had just run in her first Boston Marathon , a goal she had set for herself when she was a student at Boston College and watched the marathoners run by the campus at Mile 21 on Patriots Day.

She was training for the Berlin Marathon in Germany that fall of 2022. The numbness started to spread, up her legs. To her thighs. Her hands. She was dragging her feet and stumbling.

Pehota, who grew up in Fairfield and lives in Boston, was 29 years old, a former cheerleader for Boston College and the Boston Celtics. She was in peak shape. Something was clearly wrong.

A few weeks before Berlin, she tested positive for Lyme disease. There was a sigh of relief between her and her boyfriend Matt Keemon, who was going

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