LEBANON, Ohio — Jenni Blake is holding back tears. She watches herself on her phone, and she says it looks like she had a stroke.
She’s sitting in her favorite coffee shop in Lebanon, only a few blocks from her home health care business. At one time, she couldn’t walk here without clinging to the brick walls and benches outside.
Most days, she didn’t know if she could get out of bed and into the shower. In the video on her phone, Blake is lying down.
“It feels like I have something sitting on my chest,” she said. “It feels like I have bees in my legs. And my legs feel like tree trunks.”
Blake has dozens of these videos.
She took them because she didn’t know what else to do.
In the videos, she almost looks like a different person. And in many ways, she was. Blake was scared to go to sleep at night, because she didn’t know how she would feel when she woke up in the morning.
The videos turned into her long COVID diaries. She’s sharing them publicly because of one word: hope.
In Ohio and Kentucky, health officials say COVID-19 cases are on the rise. The virus probably won't kill you, but medical experts say anyone who gets infected could get long COVID.
And that could change your life.
“The virus never went away,” said Dr. Mohammed Elamir, lead physician at Aviv Clinics in Florida. “Long COVID is real. It’s a real condition.”
Elamir leads the care team at Aviv, a medical program that specializes in hyperbaric oxygen treatment. That’s where Blake went when she didn’t know where else to go.
In Florida, she lived in an RV for months while undergoing treatment. Back home, her neighbors helped keep her business running. One person gave her money, and other nearby business owners sent customers to her store.
“I was terrified,” Blake said. “I thought, ‘I’m going to lose my business. I’m going to lose my home.’”
Almost one year later, Blake holds up her phone inside a business that is still open.
“This is my brain before treatment,” she says, flipping through old brain scans.
There’s red and green and yellow and orange. There’s also blue.
Blue is bad — and there’s a lot of blue.
Blake originally got sick in 2020. Then, she got COVID again in the fall of 2022. She basically never got better. Blake struggled to walk and says she fell 11 times before leaving Ohio for treatment.
Now, she hopes to run a marathon someday.
“Every day I wake up and I’m just grateful,” she said.
While holding back tears, she also said her COVID diaries make her happy. Because that’s not her life anymore — even if she’s not completely better.
Because when Blake gets tired, her brain is slow to tell the rest of her body to move. Her feet often feel like sponges, and sometimes her face locks up.
“It’s over for many many people,” Blake said of the pandemic. “But for people like myself — and other families like mine — it's not over yet.”
On a recent Wednesday morning, Blake carries a sign from her store down to the corner of Broadway Street. She smiles because there was a time she couldn’t do this.
Inside, she turns on the lights and prepares to open. She laughs as she walks up the stairs.
“Not even holding on,” she said.
