A great-grandmother from Brooklyn was finally reunited with her family over the weekend after a five-month battle with coronavirus.
Marie Jean-Pierre, 73, was first admitted to the hospital in March with a fever and difficulty breathing, shortly after returning from a family trip to Spain, according to CNN. Jean-Pierre tested positive for COVID-19, and remained in the hospital for the next three months. At one point she was placed on a ventilator.
“It was so bad and it was hurting me and I couldn’t breathe,” Jean-Pierre told CNN . "They put a trach [tube] in my throat and that thing is painful. I don’t want nobody, even my own enemy to do that thing. Very painful."
"She was fighting every step of the way,” daughter Marie Delus said in a separate interview with the outlet.
After her hospitalization, Jean-Pierre was transferred to a rehabilitation facility, where she spent the next two months relearning how to walk and talk.
Throughout that time she was only able to see her family — which includes 6 children, 11 grandchildren and 9 great-grandchildren — through a glass partition. "I could not touch them, they could not touch me," she told CNN. "It was very bad."
Finally, on Saturday, she was able to go home and reunite with them in person.
Asked what kept her going through her months-long battle, Jean-Pierre credited her family, the power of prayer and the doctors and therapists who helped her recover.
“All the doctors, they really helped me. They don’t let me lay down and give up,” she told CNN, noting that even on the most difficult days, they kept pushing her.
Jean-Pierre said that while she cried at her family reunion, the tears were of joy, not sadness.
“I was so happy to see everybody,” she said.
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