Mother reveals horror of losing newlywed young daughter to brain-eating amoeba 'she caught swimming in lake on pre-wedding family vacation'

A California mother has opened up about the horrific experience of watching her once-vibrant daughter fade away and die from a little understood brain-eating amoeba.

Sybil Meister firmly believes her daughter Koral Reef picked up the deadly and mysterious Balamuthia mandrillaris infection during a family trip to Lake Havasu in May 2013.

Reef married her high school sweetheart that July and began to show worsening symptoms like headache, fatigue and stiff neck a couple of months later.

By October 2014, Reef would be dead. She was 20-years-old. 

Tragic: Koral Reef, left, was a blushing bride in July 2013 as she wed her high school sweetheart. The 20-year-old Temecula, California woman would be dead just over a year later from a rare, deadly and incurable brain-eating amoeba infection

Now her mother is on a mission to educate the world about the dangers of Balamuthia mandrillaris, for which there is no proven treatment.

'They said, ''Oh, she's having withdrawal from her birth control; It's a migraine.'' They gave her medicine and sent her home and then she progressively got worse,' Meister recalled in an interview with KNTV.

That was in 2013 and the family couldn't possibly have foreseen the horrors ahead. 

After all, Koral had just married her high school sweetheart Corey Pier. In fact, the attractive young couple were barely even out of high school when the trouble began.

'She started with the headaches, the stiff neck, the sensitivity to light and heat was bad,' Meister said.

According to the Press Enterprise, the symptoms steadily worsened. Over the course of months, once-healthy Koral began to regularly experience blurred vision, lethargy and mood changes.

Terrible decline: Reef's family believes she picked up the rare Balamuthia mandrillaris infection on a May 2013 trip to Lake Havasu