It's hard to imagine losing a loved one, a wife, a husband, a child.

For many, it's their biggest fear.

Amarissa Jones, host of The Vanished.

A podcast that tells the stories of often overlooked and unsolved missing persons cases,

in an effort to uncover the truth.

Follow The Vanished on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm Umat and when I was a graduate student, I was doing field work in Panama.

It was just this amazing place with tropical birds and I loved the fieldwork I did.

I had to like hike up these rivers in the forest and find these insects and it was so diverse and

amazing. But you know, it was also tropical. So we had, we were getting bit by insects.

We were getting water and foods. We, you know, we're dealing with a lot of animals and things and

those five of us living in this house is pretty crowded. Five of us and I kept.

And then one morning I woke up exhausted. I had had fever the night before and these awful

dreams and and a headache and I knew that something was up and so I, I just rested that day and I tried

to kind of, you know, nourish myself, have a lot of water, have a lot of food.

And I got, I felt better, you know, by the afternoon, I was able to take a walk and everything.

I said, okay, maybe this was just a short-term thing. Everything would be fine.

And then that night it was worse. I had this awful fever, really, really bad headaches.

And in the morning I was just feeling awful. And so, you know, I didn't have a car at the time and

luckily I got a friend of mine to drive, drive me to a clinic. And so I got to the clinic and I

explained my symptoms and, you know, they're like, well, this is, this sounds like Denge and we're

going to test your blood. And so they took a blood test and they didn't find Denge. So they sent me

...