A Bay Area newlywed couple got a lot more than they bargained for out of their trip to Hawaii in January, i.e. a terrible parasite, and thankfully they are both home and recovering three months later.

Hawaii News Now/KGMB broke the story of 64-year-old Ben Manilla, a UC Berkeley professor of journalism, and 57-year-old Eliza Lape, who went to Maui to get married in January and stayed on for two weeks afterward in the area of Hana. They both arrived back in the Bay Area with a brain-infecting parasite called rat lungworm disease, cases of which have recently been on the upswing on Hawaii's Big Island and on Maui.

Neither knows how they contracted the disease, but Lape tells the station that she began experiencing symptoms before the left the island. "My symptoms started growing to feeling like somebody was taking a hot knife and just stabbing me in different parts of my body," she said.

Manilla's case appears to have been more severe, and he was in intensive care for a month, and is still going through "intensive rehabilitation" he says. "I’ve had several operations, two pneumonias, a blood clot. Right now, I’m dealing with a kidney issue, all of which was spurred by the rat lung," he tells KGMB.

Rat lungworm disease, from the parasite Angiostrongylus, is carried by rats and typically transmitted to humans via slugs and snails on produce.

CBS 5 reports that nine cases have been confirmed in Hawaii, with six on Maui, and the Hawaii Department of Health is currently investigating four more. This follows on reports of only two cases on Maui over the last decade.

The Associated Press reports that the parasitic infection is seen on average about ten times a year in Hawaii, statewide, but the majority of those cases have been on the Big Island.

While the snails and slugs may be easy to kill, experts say the parasite is not. People eating raw produce that has any part of a slug or snail on it, or a freshwater shrimp infected with the parasite, can be sickened.

Lape just wants other people to know that the danger is out there. "Had we known we were walking into this kind of environment, we would have had a completely different attitude," she tells KGMB. "It really does disrupt and destroy people's lives."