ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.  Debra Welsh is feeling better, thank you, considering her brush with bubonic plague.

And she's learned a lesson: Don't touch wobbly mice.

"Those little drunken, wobbly mice would get into the house and you could get right up to them and pick them up by their tails and drop them in the toilet," she said Tuesday.

"And they would die real fast. We found six of them over the past six months," Welsh said from her St. Joseph Hospital bed, where a tube trickled antibiotics into her body to fight the disease.

Welsh, 43, who lives just north of Albuquerque, was confirmed late Monday as suffering from the disease - the first human plague case of the year in New Mexico.

"She's in fine condition," said Dr. David Keller, chief of the infectious disease epidemiology program at the state Department of Health.

Keller said the department is trying to determine how Welsh got the plague, but she has an idea. She found the last wobbly mouse around Christmas.

"I actually saw it and it ran behind a cabinet. Then one of the dogs was scratching at something, and the mouse had died at the foot of the pedestal table," she said.

Welsh used a paper towel to pick up the mouse and tossed it in the garbage, then washed her hands with antibacterial soap.

She became ill Friday.

"I noticed that I had a swollen lymph node, then it quickly went downhill from there. The chills. Lower back pain like you can get with the flu," she said.

On Saturday, she went to see a doctor, who immediately ordered her hospitalized.

Plague is typically thought to be a summertime disease, but can strike year-round. The last human plague death in the state was in 1994,  an 8-year-old northern New Mexico boy.