HERSHEY, Pa. — After spending seven days in the hospital recovering from COVID-19, Jacqueline Fair came home to a life very different from what she had known.

“When I came out of the hospital, my medications were all changed, and I was on oxygen,” said the 73-year-old Fair. “I was very limited, as far as what I could do. That started a whole new type of life for me.”

Fair, who sees herself as a fighter, was shocked when she ventured downstairs to do her laundry just one week later and then struggled to climb the steps.

“I tried to come back upstairs and thought I was going to die,” she said. “I had to stop midway to breathe deeply.”

On the advice of her respiratory specialist, Fair turned to the pulmonary rehabilitation program at Penn State Health St. Joseph Medical Center, which has been in operation for more than 30 years. Since the beginning of the year, the program has offered targeted rehabilitation to all post-COVID patients who continue to have symptoms four weeks after their initial diagnosis — a service that had been missing since the start of the pandemic, when only those patients who met certain criteria were eligible for the program.

“At the beginning of all of this, our post-COVID patients had no idea of where to go. Now we know that pulmonary rehabilitation is good for them,” said Lilly Morales, pulmonary rehabilitation lead. “In January 2022, Medicare approved a new post-COVID diagnosis code, making pulmonary rehabilitation available to a lot of patients in our community who don’t have another respiratory condition.”

During the 8- to 12-week program, therapists educate patients about their conditions so they know how to prevent breathing problems and take control of their health. They also guide them through individually paced exercises that strengthen muscles to improve breathing. They use treadmills, recumbent bikes, arm bikes, a sit-down elliptical, free weights and a step box.

“We do a six-minute walk when we start a patient in the program to have a comparison at the end to see how much they’ve improved,” Morales said. “We do education on how to breathe appropriately, how to train yourself to breathe the right way, how to conserve energy, how to reduce stress and much more. Everything revolves around improving activities of daily living and quality of life.”

Fair, who no longer uses oxygen during the day and does her own cooking and cleaning, credits the program with her success.

“I feel it helped me a great deal. Everything I do, I go slower, but I take a break in between things and get back to it,” she said, adding that encouraging words from the staff and the cleanliness of the gym created a safe environment where she could excel. Fair’s experience was so positive that she chose to enroll in the pulmonary rehabilitation maintenance program once she completed the monitored program.

Although every patient is different and every story is different, Morales said most patients complete the program with positive results.

“It is heartening for those who have suffered for so long to know that they can gain some abilities back that they’ve lost,” she said. “That is the ultimate goal. Whatever they learn here, we want them to take it with them and continue it. That is how they’ll succeed long term.”

For more information on St. Joseph Medical Center’s pulmonary rehabilitation program for long-COVID patients, call 610-378-2659.