'I Wanted To Die': Frankfort COVID-19 Long-Hauler Shares Story

FRANKFORT, IL — Nearly three months after she tested positive for the coronavirus, Frankfort resident Yvette Jones is still facing daily side effects. Jones, 55, an area real estate agent and a U.S. Army veteran, calls herself a COVID-19 long-hauler who is still dealing with aftereffects of the virus, including brain fog, insomnia, heart palpitations, pneumonia, appetite loss and even a change in her eye prescription due to vision loss.

Jones and her husband, another U.S. Army veteran, had traveled to Las Vegas in January. When they returned, her husband had a backache and a sore throat, and he tested positive for the coronavirus, she told Patch.

She tried to quarantine away from him in their home but soon began to feel symptoms of aches, headache, fever and chills. She tested positive for the coronavirus Jan. 21.

Jones went home and isolated but still continued to feel worse from her symptoms.

"I took Tylenol, cold medicine, cough syrup; nothing helped," she told Patch.

By the eighth day of her isolation, she said she couldn't take it anymore, and she went to the emergency room at Franciscan St. James Hospital in Olympia Fields.

After some tests, doctors told her she had pneumonia in her left lung.

"I just started bawling," she said. Jones' mother died of COVID-19-related pneumonia in April 2020.

She spent several days in the hospital with little relief of her symptoms.

"My daughter asked, 'How do you feel?' I told her, 'I want to die,'" Jones recalled. "I prayed to God to take the pain away or take me."

After several days in the hospital, Jones said doctors told her they were going to release her and continue a steroid treatment at home. However, she told them no.

"I said, 'I'm not going out the same way I came here,'" Jones said.

She spoke to an infectious disease doctor, whom she called an "angel," and asked about her treatment options.

Jones then received convalescent plasma therapy, a type of treatment in which people with coronavirus receive plasma donated by people who have recovered from COVID-19. The donated plasma has antibodies for the virus, which can help the person's ability to fight it.

"It started to work in 48 hours, all the pain was gone," Jones said. "[However,] it killed the COVID, but it didn't stop the aftereffects."

Jones has said she has been unable to work and live the way she had before the virus. In her work as a Realtor, Jones holds homebuying seminars for veterans and is a certified military relocation professional.

"I had brain fog," she said. "It felt like I couldn't think. I couldn't read, couldn't work, because I can't focus."

Jones ended her antibiotic treatment for pneumonia in March for the infection in her left lung, and recently got a heart rate monitor to see why she was still having heart palpitations.

"Nothing hasn't been affected," she said.

Jones said she is grateful to still be alive.

"I believe I had to experience these things to be able to share my story with others," she wrote in an email to Patch.

"Having a near-death experience has taught me to appreciate life. Appreciate the time that I am here on this Earth. Appreciate my family. Appreciate the gifts that I’ve been presented with. Appreciate the rest and mental break. Appreciate the solitude."