COVID-19 affects everyone differently, but it provided prolonged torture to one New Jersey woman—one that took 233 days to end. Joanne Masciocchi, 65, spent almost all of 2021 between four hospitals as she grappled with COVID, with 70 of those days spent in a medically induced coma. The ordeal prompted her family to call in a priest to perform her last rites six times, fearing any off moment could be her last. “Several times they called us—five or six times—and told us this might be it,” Danielle Masciocchi, Joanne’s eldest daughter, told NJ.com. “There are no words to describe it other than hopeless.” But her condition later improved, allowing her to get off a ventilator and, at a rehab center, learn to speak and walk again. One of the priests who saw her at the center only had one title for her. “I call her the Miracle Lady,” he said.

Joanne Masciocchi said the ordeal was hard for even her to believe, even as her family consistently labeled her a fighter. “Sometimes I’ve asked the Lord, ‘Why did this happen to me?’” she said. “I don’t know why. But it is what it is. Everybody has something to bear in life. This has been my challenge. Now it’s back to work.” Her family has set up a GoFundMe to help pay for her medical expenses.