Patient says her care at UConn Health helped her overcome a series of problems that followed a COVID-19 diagnosis and kept her sidelined for 2 ½ years
Sherri Beck's completion of the 2023 Hartford Half Marathon is a personal triumph she says was made possible by the care she had received at UConn Health over the course of two years of health challenges following her March 2021 COVID-19 diagnosis. (Photo provided by Sherri Beck)
For someone who turned 50 and then ran 13 half-marathons in a 12-month period, simply finishing a 5-mile race may not seem like much of an accomplishment.
But Sherri Beck has a different outlook. A 2021 bout with COVID-19 that started off seemingly innocuous touched off more than two years of health problems that made crossing the finish line a major accomplishment.
"I had a very mild case to start," Beck says of her COVID diagnosis that March. "I was following all the restrictions. Back then, it was, don't even leave your house. It was really, really strict, and I followed it to a T because I didn't want to get anybody else sick. I did exactly what I was supposed to do."
Beck was 51 at the time, recently had completed a full marathon, and was planning to run in the Hartford Marathon that fall.
"I do love running," she says. "I'm not fast, but it's my love. I love being outside, with my running friends. It's just something I enjoy doing. I felt like I was pretty darn healthy. Especially just before I got COVID, I felt strong."
She recalls having energy to burn and spending much of her two weeks of isolation with her hula hoop and her elliptical machine to tire herself out so she could sleep at night.
Her sister, Tammy Davino, a nurse practitioner in the UConn John Dempsey Hospital intensive care unit, would check in with her daily.
"Early COVID, we were concerned that there was going to be a procoagulopathic thing - people would develop clots associated with it," Davino says. "So we never really knew. In the early phases, when she would have some symptoms and I would say, let's get some care for this."
Davino recalls the need to stay grounded upon learning about her sister's diagnosis, against the backdrop of the previous year seeing some of the worst cases of COVID-19 on her own hospital floor.
"You saw variability in how COVID affected people, so you have to keep it all in perspective and you can't jump to conclusions," Davino says. "You have to check in and say, 'How are you feeling and what are your symptoms and are you OK at home?' And that type of thing. And Sherri's like, 'Oh, my God, I'm fine. I don't have any trouble breathing. I'm just a little tired,' whatever it was. So with respect to the acute COVID, like when we saw patients in the ICU, it wasn't as concerning"
Then, about a month after she thought she had gotten over COVID-19, Beck started having different types of symptoms.
"Every day I would send Tammy a text and I would say, 'bad headache,' or 'fever,' or 'exhausted by 9 o'clock in the morning,' whatever the symptoms were," Beck says. "I had neuropathy in my legs, I had all different types of things that were going on."
It was becoming clear her short-term memory was failing and she was developing neurological problems. The texts to Davino would serve as a log of her health problems.
The care at UConn Health was phenomenal, and so I kept coming here with all the different scenarios that happened. — Sherri Beck
A certain amount of time would have to pass before Beck would become eligible to be seen by Dr. Ameer Rasheed in the long COVID clinic. During that wait she found herself in the emergency department with chest pain, but her heart was determined to be fine and she went home.
When she got in with Rasheed, "he tested my lungs, and they were fine. He did everything he needed to do for my lungs to make sure that I was fine before he released me."
More and New Problems
The chest pains would come and go, along with stabbing abdominal pain, and problems with her left eye.
"All these little things just kept popping up that I never had before, and I just kept going to all different doctors."
She went to Dr. Jaime Imitola, director of UConn Health's Division of Multiple Sclerosis and Translational Neuroimmunology, for her neurological problems.
"She had Initial symptoms that are typical for neurological manifestation of long COVID like brain fog, cognitive decline, severe and persistent fatigue, headaches, all of which has improved significantly after our investigation and management," Imitola says.
"I was very, very dizzy, and some of my walks were like crawls, to the point where sometimes I would just go around the block, and I didn't know if I would make it home," Beck says. "I had to go to physical therapy, cognitive therapy, and balancing therapy, as I had a few falls."
