Hiding in Plain Sight

Last spring, Jim LeBlond woke in the middle of the night gasping for breath. As his wife, Jeanne, rushed him to the emergency room, they never suspected that the cause could be anything other than the respiratory disease that had the world in its grip. It turned out the threat to his life was more mundane - and much closer to home.

- JUDI KETTELER

While scrolling through social media last June, a shocking post caught my eye. A woman in my neighborhood described a mysterious ordeal involving her husband. Out of nowhere, the previously healthy man had gotten suddenly and severely ill. He had nearly died and was still fighting to recover. Like amateur sleuths, the family had been searching for the cause of his rapid decline. What they discovered, before even the doctors realized it, was terrifying, because it was something that could have just as easily happened to me, literally in my own backyard.

The first weekend of May last year, Jim LeBlond was busy with a familiar springtime ritual: clearing out his backyard. He was in a hurry because his city of Madeira, OH-a suburb of Cincinnati-offered curbside brush and limb pickup during the first week of May. “I worked an entire weekend clearing honeysuckle and the weeds around it with an electric chain saw,” Jim says. It had been a wet spring, and the weeds were already everywhere. “I saw a lot of white flowers, but I didn't think anything of it." By the time Jim was taking the last batch of limbs out to the curb Monday evening, he started to feel bad. He wasn't sure whether he was simply exhausted from a long weekend of work or he was coming down with something. COVID-19 briefly crossed his mind, but he was fully vaccinated. He decided to go to bed early, figuring he would probably feel better the next day.