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Natalya Jones doesn’t remember a lot about her COVID-19 experience.
The woman who for many years has overseen the Menlo Children’s Center and the Belle Haven Child Development Center as director of Menlo Park’s child care programs was hospitalized with a severe case of COVID-19 for nearly two and a half months, from April 25 to July 6.
She’d just come back from Mexico and felt fine, but she got tested as a just-in-case measure, she said in an interview.
“Everybody’s tests came back negative except for mine,” she said.
She was feeling fine and checked in with her doctor. Later, she began to cough.
She said her daughter Brooklyn, who also works at the Menlo Children’s Center, took her to the Kaiser hospital in Antioch in the middle of the night after she became kind of delirious, speaking but not making sense.
“That’s all I remember,” Jones said.
She woke up a month later at a hospital in Santa Clara.
Jones is still piecing together what happened to her while she was hospitalized, but once she did wake up, she said, her recovery seemed to progress remarkably quickly.
“From what I hear from the nurses, there were many people in my same situation that didn’t make it,” she said.”They expected me to go from the hospital to have to go either (to) a nursing home or a rehab facility, and I was able to come home.”
She said she’s still on oxygen support and relies on her family to help her with basic household activities, like cooking meals and using the stairs in their home in Brentwood.
While her family moved to Brentwood in the East Bay about seven years ago, Jones said she was raised in East Palo Alto and spent much of her youth in Menlo Park.
Right now, she’s working on occupational and physical therapy and trying to be patient with her body while it recovers. The experience has made her look at life differently and value the people in her life more, she said.
“Now that I’m home, I know I’m getting stronger each day,” she said. “It’s a very, very slow process.”
Daughter Brooklyn said the experience was “definitely scary.”
“When she was in the hospital, I had to step up to pay bills and figure out all that,” she said.
The family is receiving disability benefits, but Brooklyn has since returned to work to help with expenses, even while she’s had to help her mom coordinate doctor’s appointments.
Battling vaccine hesitancy
Before contracting COVID-19, Jones said, she was wary of the COVID-19 vaccines and hadn’t received one.
“I just felt it was developed really fast,” she said. “I didn’t necessarily trust it.”
Now, she said, she works to dissuade other skeptics of their vaccine hesitancy.
“I try to tell people, yeah, it was created really fast, and yeah, there’s a lot of questions, (but) it could save your life,” Jones said. “I could have been dead. I don’t want somebody to go through that.”
“It’s so real, and it’s deadly. I would just say, take every precaution you can.”
Natalya Jones, head of Menlo Park’s child care programs and COVID-19 survivor
“If I had (the vaccine), I wouldn’t have gotten hit as hard,” she added.
The message she’s sharing, she said, is that COVID is real.
“Protect yourself. Protect your loved ones,” she said.
The virus doesn’t follow rules, and if you become ill, you don’t know what’s going to happen, she said. “They couldn’t explain why I got it so bad but the person next to me (didn’t). There’s no rule to it. It’s so real, and it’s deadly. I would just say, take every precaution you can.”
She said she received her second dose of a COVID-19 vaccine on July 23, the same day she spoke with The Almanac.
‘I was just shocked’
To support Jones and her family while she was hospitalized, a crowd fundraiser on the website GoFundMe has, to date, generated about $21,000 for Jones’ recovery from 192 donations, with many donors from the local community.
Jones said she was overwhelmed with appreciation when she learned about the fund.
“When I woke up and saw it, I was just shocked, surprised and very grateful,” she said. “Even now, I’m still shocked at how much was raised by families in the community that I’ve been working with. I never expected that outpouring of love and support.”
Right now, she doesn’t yet have a timeline for when she’ll get back to her work with children.
But she’s not done, she said.
“Once I can get back to a baseline, I’ll be going back. I have a lot more I think I can offer to the community,” she said.
If only someone had informed her that there was a vaccine and that it worked because hundreds of thousands of healthcare workers – including doctors and scientists – had already take the vaccine.
Oh wait, she knew ? Huh. And she went to Mexico to party… and somehow she got Covid ? Well that’s a shocker. How much did all this advanced healthcare cost and who is paying for that ?
Insurance companies are allowed to make being the victim of spousal abuse a “pre-existing condition” and can deny you coverage in most states. Shameful.
How long will it take them to declare reckless stupidity a pre-existing condition?
“How long will it take them to declare reckless stupidity a pre-existing condition?”
Can’t happen soon enough.
I get that this is supposed to be a feel-good story. Instead, it made me angry. As a child care worker, she had earlier access to the vaccines than most of us, and she chose not to get the vaccine because it was developed too quickly. But covid happened pretty fast too, and has proven deadly to millions. Facts, not fear.
Still, seems as though the city was not mandating vaccines, and it was her prerogative not to get one. But she didn’t take precautions. She vacationed far from home at least four times after the pandemic began.
If I had children in the city’s child care programs, I’d take them out. The director is a person with poor judgment, and I’d have no confidence that she’d keep my kids safe.
Observer:
you are 100 percent spot on.
Observer,
The article felt like it either wanted to be a feel good story or a cautionary tale. For me, it’s absolutely a cautionary tale and I agree with everything you wrote.
Shame on the City Manager (her boss) and the City Council for NOT requiring someone entrusted with the care of our children to be vaccinated. it is simply irresponsible.
at a minimum she should be dismissed from her job for this disregard to the health and wellbeing of the very people she is hired to care for and protect.
at a minimum she failed an IQ test, stupidity is not a job qualification…..
Roy Thiele-Sardina
At the risk of being accused of blowing our own horn, the HeadsUp! Montessori Preschool and Emerson Montessori School in Palo Alto (as well as sister programs in North San Jose and Pleasanton) mandated vaccinations for all employees back in March. We have not advertised the fact because we assumed every child care center and school would require vaccinations.
It is shocking and discouraging to see that public sector administrators would prefer to support the freedom of one person to choose not to be vaccinated, while denying hundreds of child and family-member clients the freedom (and the knowledge) to enjoy the higher probability of a disease-free environment.
As a board member of the Menlo Park Fire Protection District, I was shocked to learn that 20% of our paramedics and EMTs are not vaccinated. I have introduced a proposal to mandate vaccinations for all employees and, on Tuesday night, it was referred to the Human Resources Committee of the board. I hope community members who care about these things will contact the Fire District and express support: https://www.menlofire.org/fp-contact-us.