UAB Medicine employees Corey and Jenny Agricola met on the job and became friends, which led to marriage and starting a family. That sounds like a straightforward series of events, but as with any story involving great adversity, the drama is in the details. Their experiences gave the couple a unique perspective on their work and how they serve patients.
Jenny, an occupational therapist with nearly 17 years of experience, is the lead spinal cord injury therapist at UAB Spain Rehabilitation Center (Spain Rehab). Corey is a board-certified chaplain with UAB Spiritual Health, serving with the Palliative and Comfort Care Unit since 2015. Together they also manage Our Hope International, a nonprofit that Jenny formed in 2011 that partners with Home of Hope, an orphanage in Uganda for children with multiple disabilities.
The couple describe their work at UAB Medicine in terms of human interaction, apart from the purely clinical aspects of their jobs. “I knew after completing grad school at UAB that I wanted to work here,” Jenny said. “The goal of occupational therapy is to help patients regain as much function as possible, and I get to see them get their lives back in real time. They lost something crucial, and we help them find it again. That’s the real joy and satisfaction in this work.”
While bereavement care is a science, Corey says there’s also an art to his job. “I think some of my best work is done in the shadows, in that space out of view where you can read the emotional temperature of the room,” he said. “I need to find cues for when to speak and when to exit. I call it ‘listening for the poetry’ when I’m attempting to understand the meaning of what‘s going on with the patient, the family, and others who are in that moment.”
Professional and personal interest
The two first met in 2015, during Corey’s residency with UAB Spiritual Health. “When Corey was doing his residency at Spain Rehab, our paths would cross now and then,” Jenny said. “I learned from coworkers after he left that he had been asking them questions about me.”
“That’s true,” Corey admits. “I had seen how she has a real gift for connecting with patients. I knew about her mission work with Our Hope International. I knew her faith was a major part of her life and work. I appreciated her work ethic and her drive. I returned to UAB in 2015 as a staff chaplain. I was still interested in Jenny professionally and personally, but I had to keep in mind boundaries, as far as expressing a personal interest. Yet I was thinking I would really like to know her better. A friend of ours finally sort of set things up for us.”
“It started with a lunch date and quietly progressed from there,” Jenny said. “But there came a time when we knew we were a couple. We knew we were serious, and then we got comfortable sharing that with friends and coworkers.”
At that time, Jenny and Corey could not have imagined how complicated and challenging their relationship would become.
‘I could feel my body fading’
In April 2017, everything Corey thought he knew about his physical health changed. He was still physically active and working out regularly, but he was experiencing shortness of breath. Even after being treated for pneumonia at an urgent care clinic, his condition soon became severe.
“On a Friday at the end of April, I parked in the 4th Avenue deck, and as I approached the sliding glass door, I could feel my entire body fading,” Corey said. “If a Guest Services employee hadn’t helped me to the ED, I might not be here today. I don’t remember anything after that. What I now know is that on Monday I was lifting weights, and by the next Friday I was on a ventilator.”
Jenny knew that Corey was on his way to the hospital due to his worsening pneumonia, but she had no idea that he was experiencing total system failure from sepsis. This potentially deadly condition causes our natural infection defenses to turn against the body, often leading to organ malfunction or failure.
“I knew he was sick, but I did not know the true state of his health until I arrived,” Jenny said. “Seeing Corey intubated created a single thought for me, which was, ‘This is bad.’ Corey was going into cardiac failure, kidney failure — everything at once, it seemed. He was transferred from the ED to the Medical Intensive Care Unit, a unit he regularly covered as a chaplain. From that point forward, I never left the hospital, until he went home a month later.”
A proposal postponed
Along with the physical trauma caused by sepsis, Corey was experiencing mental and emotional distress. This was made worse by an inability to communicate, even as he gradually became aware of what was going on around him.
“Unbeknownst to Jenny, I had planned to propose to her on May 7,” Corey said. “I had a hot air balloon reserved for rental in Franklin, Tennessee, and I had this grand, elaborate proposal mapped out. The dry erase board showed days ticking by, and I was thinking, ‘Gosh, I need to get out of here or I’m not going to make it to Tennessee in time for the proposal.’ I heard a physician tell others that I had about four days left to live. The doctor was asking Jenny and my family questions that I knew the answers to, but I felt trapped inside my body.”
Corey understood that the side effects of medications he was receiving could cause odd sensations and visual distortions, but he sensed that something else was going on.
“A lot of that is explainable,” he said. “But what is sometimes called a ‘near-death experience’, for me at least, doesn’t have an explanation. At times I was in the presence of what appeared to be a mountain of pure light, and other times I saw a black sky filled with stars, across which were lines of scripture written in gold. It was a heavenly vision, but not like those illustrations you might see in children’s Sunday school books. Nothing fanciful. Strangely enough, the lines of scripture were not passages I had ever memorized or studied. In addition to the visuals, I also heard worship music, but nothing like I had heard before. My experience is included in a book about comas and near-death experiences that was published this year and written by noted BBC correspondent Alan Pearce” (and his wife, Beverley).
A little help from their friends
Jenny recalls the relief she felt when Corey began to recover, came off the ventilator, and showed other signs of improvement.
“I was thrilled and thankful to God that Corey had survived,” she said. “However, Corey was extremely upset that his engagement plans were disrupted. It was as if he had a separate set of priorities in the middle of all this. Some of the staff got wind of his disappointment and began helping him secretly plan an engagement. One night, he got fully dressed and said he wanted to leave the hospital room for a short while, just to get a break. Being an occupational therapist, I was thinking, ‘That’s great! What a positive, therapeutic attitude. I’m so proud of you!’”
But after a short while, Jenny began to correctly suspect that there was more going on.
“Corey mentioned that there was a break in the rain, and he asked me if I wanted go up on the roof and walk out to the helipad, just for fun,” Jenny recalled. “As soon as we got up to the floor, there were staff opening doors for us. There was a bouquet of flowers, music was playing, and nurses were standing there with umbrellas. Corey proposed to me right there on the helipad. That was May 20 of 2017. We went home at the end of that month, and our wedding took place the following November. Anyone at our wedding who didn’t know this whole incredible backstory would not have known anything was out of the ordinary.”
Childbearing challenges
The Agricolas say they waited two years after marriage before trying to have children, but the pregnancy brought another medical challenge. Years earlier, Jenny was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis and underwent major procedures to remove most of her gastrointestinal (GI) tract. When she became pregnant, her medical team watched her closely for signs of complications.
“Sure enough, at seven months, I woke up one night in excruciating pain and was taken by ambulance to UAB,” Jenny said. “Later, at 37 weeks, I was back with the same GI problem. Our little boy, Noble, was born two weeks early. I required surgery two months later. Basically, the growth of my baby had created pressure on what little GI tract I still had. So, our having a family involved fertilization specialists, the wonderful obstetrics and gynecology team, and GI specialists and surgeons at UAB.”
The couple say that their daunting experiences gave them new perspectives on their roles as care partners. “It taught us what patients experience, as well as what their care partners may have to deal with,” Jenny said. “Most people understand that major medical situations can bring all kinds of worries to a family. But when you go through it yourself, that understanding has more weight, and that’s valuable to me as a therapist.”
Corey agrees. As a former U.S. Marine who maintained his physical fitness and enjoyed an extremely active life, he was concerned that his serious conditions might change him forever.
“I lost muscle mass and had to learn how to walk all over again,” Corey said. “I was worried that I might be on dialysis the rest of my life. I was grieving for my identity and my independence. Before then, I had helped hundreds of people with grief, but I felt somehow apart – as a professional – from the actual bereavement. I was ‘untouchable’, because it was my role to be the care partner, but my illness taught me that I’m not untouchable. It gave me a new look at what loss means. That experience has made me a better chaplain, I hope.”