By Braedan Shea
Jenn Thomas couldn’t feel anything below her legs.
As she lay in the emergency room at Lawrence and Memorial Hospital in New London, Conn., almost a dozen doctors and nurses swarmed her. They urgently hooked countless wires and needles to her body. Then, as they rushed her out of the emergency room and into treatment, they informed Thomas that she would be undergoing a six-hour drip of Intravenous Immune Globulin (IVIG) in an effort to stop the progression of the lack of sensation, which was now creeping toward her waist.
Thomas lay there and thought, “This was not how 2020 was supposed to start.”
Just a few days prior, Thomas and twelve friends – many of them classmates (and, like Thomas, former athletes) from Springfield College – kicked off the New Year by hitting the slopes at Sunday River Ski Resort in Bethel, Maine.
It was the perfect way to begin the year. Thomas was in the best shape of her life and spending time with some of the people she loved most.
But on the drive home to Waterford, Conn., on Jan. 4, Thomas started feeling off.
“I remember pressing the gas and being like, ‘Huh? That was weird,’” she said.
Her legs and mind were not on the same page. Every action that required her to use her lower half felt harder. Something was wrong. But Thomas, who grew up in a household where, “you never go to the hospital unless you are dying,” just carried on.
In addition to the mysterious leg problems, Thomas was also congested.
“When she walked in the door, I could tell just by looking at her that she was sick,” said Wade Thomas, Jenn’s father. “She had this upper respiratory thing, and I didn’t even want to be around her.”
Thomas went to a nearby walk-in clinic for antibiotics. But by the following night, she felt far worse.
“She couldn’t even breathe, and was having a tough time just walking. All she could do was get to the wall,” Wade said. “She said, ‘It feels like there are steel plates sitting on my legs.’”
The morning of Jan. 6, Thomas called Wade – who was at work. She needed him to bring her to the emergency room. The weakness in her lower body had advanced to the point that she couldn’t drive.
After a few hours of trying to explain to her doctor the sensation – or lack thereof – she was feeling in her legs, Thomas was told to go home and only come back if it increased.
The next day, the weakness in Thomas’ legs turned to extreme pain. While trying to brush her teeth that evening, she couldn’t stand upright for any longer than 30 seconds without losing balance. By nightfall the pain became intolerable, and she told her father that if her condition got worse by the morning, she would return to the emergency room.
When she woke up, Thomas couldn’t move. She didn’t think she could get out of bed.
“I was in such denial,” Thomas said. “I kept telling myself I was fine. I clearly was not, but I didn’t want anything bad to happen. I didn’t feel like I was in my own body.”
She returned to Lawrence and Memorial Hospital and was met by the same doctor who had discharged her two days prior. This time, Thomas made sure that she was heard.
“I don’t know what else to tell you,” Thomas said. “But I think I’m gonna be paralyzed from the neck down if you don’t help me.”
The doctor responded by doing various reaction tests on Thomas’ legs before quickly leaving the room. When he returned, he was followed by that same pack of medical professionals.
“We believe you have a rare autoimmune disorder called Guillain-Barré Syndrome,” her doctor said. “We need to begin treatment immediately and aggressively attack this. We are admitting you and beginning treatment now.”
Confused and concerned, Thomas had no choice but to agree – and no idea what was coming next.
The First Draw
After the sun set on Stagg Field in March of 2023, the temperature dropped dramatically. More than a foot of snow surrounded the field, making it feel less like a few weeks from spring, and more like the middle of December. Players on the bench of the Springfield College women’s lacrosse team huddled together on the bench in an effort to stay warm.
Thomas, the head coach of the program, also briskly walked up and down the sideline. But the low temperature was the least of her worries. She was focused on something bigger.
When the game’s final buzzer sounded, Thomas watched her team emphatically celebrate, hugging one another as if they had just won the conference championship. She held back for a moment as she glanced at the scoreboard.
It read 21-14 in favor of the Pride. Thomas flashed a bright smile that rivaled the field lights. Not only had the Pride won their first game of the 2022-23 season, but Thomas had just achieved the first big accomplishment of her coaching career at Springfield: her inaugural victory leading her alma mater.
Getting her first win as Springfield head coach was huge. It was not only a step in the right direction, but the path had been much harder than Thomas expected.
Growing up in Waterford, Thomas was always active.
“Jenn was the energetic one – she was always running around,” said Jon Thomas, Jenn’s younger brother. “Our parents got us into sports. My mother was a musician, so she got us into piano and other instruments and camps and such. We grew up close. [Jenn] was like a guide to kind of figure things out.”
Thomas’ parents signed her up to play basketball and soccer. It wasn’t until high school that she picked up lacrosse. She immediately became a star. At her first tryout for the team at Waterford High School, she didn’t even have the right equipment.
“I show up and the coach goes, ‘What are you doing, Jenn? That’s a boy’s stick. You can’t try out with a men’s stick,’” Thomas said. “I was like, ‘There’s a difference?’”
The coach told Thomas she had 30 minutes to find a stick, so she called her mom and begged her to take her to DICK’S Sporting Goods. They bought the only stick they found and raced back just in time.
“I joke around now and I say that I got really strong stick skills because I was playing with a tennis racket,” Thomas said. “It had no pocket. It was a $29 stick, and I played with that the first year. But I fell in love with the game. It was so addicting.”
That passion propelled Thomas to play at the next level. She wanted to play at Springfield College. It was her dream school, but she couldn’t bring herself to turn down an athletic scholarship to play right down the street at American International College.
“For my sister, it was like, ‘I want to go to Springfield College, and I want to play lacrosse,’” Jon said. “When it didn’t work out, she was broken. Just totally heartbroken.”
Thomas didn’t stay heartbroken for long. After sticking out two years at AIC and starring as a midfielder and defender, she transferred to the place she wanted to be most: Springfield College.
And when Thomas stepped foot on Stagg Field, she could do no wrong. She made an immediate impact. In her two years playing for the Pride, she was a key part of the teams that won back-to-back NEWMAC championships in 2012 and 2013. During her senior year, Thomas was named as a captain – something she never would have imagined a few years prior.
“It’s like the classic underdog story,” Jon said. “She was pushed down, but just kept on going. That’s what I admire about my sister.”
At that time, Thomas was just fighting for a roster spot at her dream school. But in January of 2020, she was battling for something bigger: her life.
From Sideline to Sidelined
For five consecutive days, Thomas lay in the same hospital bed, in the same room, receiving her IVIG drip treatment. On what was supposed to be her last day of treatment, before she moved on to physical therapy, Thomas still had no control of her body anywhere below her ribs and was engulfed in pain. She couldn’t even roll over. Yet, the gravity of her condition hadn’t yet dawned on her until now.
A small group of doctors and nurses summoned Wade, who had remained by his daughter’s bedside, into the hallway. Thomas, intrigued by what was happening, listened intently to the conversation. What she heard shocked her.
The health care staff told Wade that if the GBS continued to travel upward, it could shut down her organs. Thomas could die from the disorder.
“I remember hearing that being like, ‘Woah,’” Thomas said. “‘This is way bigger than I thought.’”
Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS) is a rare neurological disorder in which the immune system mistakenly attacks part of the peripheral nervous system – the network of nerves located outside of the brain and along the spinal cord. It can lead to weakness, paralysis and, in worst cases, death.
GBS is generally contracted through other illnesses, such as respiratory infections. Thomas and her doctors believe that her case was caused by getting COVID-19.
Despite knowing how serious her medical condition was, Thomas was unfazed. “I’m a very positive person,” she said. “I was like, ‘Yeah, we’re good.’”
She credits her parents for keeping her so even-keeled – specifically her mother, Nancy, who battled with cancer.
“Before she passed, she was always so positive,” Thomas said. “I thought about her a lot while I was in the hospital. She never complained about cancer. She never said ‘Why me?’ She just attacked it head-on and did the best she could. I remember thinking, ‘I can’t complain. I am gonna get through this.’”
Over the next few weeks, Thomas would need a spinal tap to check for proteins in the fluid around her spinal cord. Doctors inserted a needle between the two lumbar bones to remove a sample for testing. Next was an electromyography (EMG) and nerve conduction velocity (NCV) study to determine how much nerve damage she had in her legs.
The process for an EMG includes placing a needle electrode into the quad muscles and flexing as hard as possible to determine the electrical activity. An NCV consists of attaching one or more electrodes and shocking the muscles to read the nerve response. It can be a deeply painful procedure.
For most patients, doctors will play relaxing music to calm them. Thomas is not like most patients.
“She’s like the Kool-Aid Man – I’m gonna burst through the wall,” Jon said. “She’s blasting DMX and all this ‘90s rap music, doing her best just to cope. It speaks to the, ‘nothing’s gonna stop me,’ kind of thing.”
After the testing phase, Thomas needed to rebuild the lost strength in her legs. For three hours each day, she had occupational and physical therapy to re-learn basic moments, specifically balancing and walking.
Thomas’ biggest obstacle during this time, however, was figuring out how to tell her players that she might not be able to coach them to start the season.
Once she graduated from Springfield in 2014, Thomas wanted to stay in the lacrosse realm, so she moved to the sidelines as a coach at Mount Holyoke College. At the end of the season, she left to become a graduate assistant at Mercyhurst University.
Following a two-year stint at Mercyhurst, Thomas took the head coach position at Western Connecticut State University, the same school her brother was attending. She quickly turned the once lightly-regarded Wolves into a highly-respected powerhouse, her best season coming in 2019, when she led the team to a program-best 14-5 overall record and a second-round appearance in the Little East Conference tournament.
With her ability to coach hindered, and the season quickly approaching, Thomas invited her assistant coaches to come to her hospital room.
“I remember looking at their faces,” Thomas said. “They were almost in shock that I [was] running around like a maniac a few weeks ago, and now I can’t even walk. That’s when they realized they were going to be running the show.”
The next day, her assistant coaches texted Thomas and told her that they realized they needed to come up with a plan.
They decided that her assistants would run the entirety of preseason, while she continued to rehab. When Thomas progressed enough to return home, she would inform the team. Once discharged from the hospital, 13 days after checking in, she set up a Zoom meeting with her athletes to let them know what was going on.
Thomas informed the team that she was home from the hospital, but needed time to recover. She told them to work hard, trust the process and eventually everything would work out.
“This was one of the most challenging decisions, or game plans, I had to create,” Thomas said. “I didn’t know if I was gonna recover from this. I didn’t know if I was gonna come back and coach them that season. I didn’t even know if I was ever gonna walk again. There were so many unknowns that it was challenging for me to keep them positive.”
Thomas returned back to the sideline for two games before the COVID-19 pandemic shut sports down. The time allowed Thomas to completely focus on herself.
“I started doing HIIT workouts and really getting back in the groove,” she said. “I had a follow-up Zoom call with my doctor because we couldn’t go in person right away. He told me I had to walk from one side of the room to the other. And he was in shock at how well I progressed.”
By February 2021, Thomas was back at the helm of the WestConn program. But her team’s season was again in jeopardy.
The pandemic was still looming, and lacrosse was considered a high-risk sport. After taking almost a full year off, Thomas needed to be back out on the field.
“When I came back in the fall, I was doing workouts and running with [the players] and doing everything,” Thomas said. “It was such a great thing that I overcame what I was faced with. But by December, there was a lot of talk of not [having] a season. That’s when Johnson & Wales opened up.”
Thomas initially interviewed for the job just to gain more experience. But when it became clear that JWU was definitely going to play that season, while WestConn remained unsure, Thomas made a business decision.
As her first season as head coach ended, she believed she made the right choice.
Without the help of any assistant coaches, Thomas led the Wildcats to a 2021 Great Northeast Athletic Conference (GNAC) Championship victory. The win gave JWU an automatic bid into the 2021 NCAA Division III Championship Tournament.
Huddled around a projector screen, Thomas and the rest of the team waited to see who they would face.
The Wildcats cheered loud when their name was announced. Seconds later, those cheers turned into nervous laughter, and all eyes turned toward Thomas.
Their opening-round opponent was … Western Connecticut.
Thomas would be facing her old team, as well as her former coaching staff, in the biggest game of her coaching career thus far. It would also turn out to be her hardest game.
“I was coaching against myself,” Thomas said.
Thomas runs her team’s warmups based on the time on the scoreboard. It was a style that she brought everywhere she went. It was also, apparently, still in effect at Western Connecticut even after she left.
“It was identical on both sides,” Thomas said. “Same drills happening, same whistles. That was a crazy experience for me.”
Thomas tried her best to pull away, but ultimately couldn’t find a way to outsmart herself. WestConn dismantled JWU, 20-5.
A Second Stint at Springfield
On July 10, 2022, Thomas got a phone call from her former head coach at Springfield, Kristen Mullady. Hearing from Mullady wasn’t a surprise, as the two had remained good friends and stayed in touch over the years.
“I’m thinking that she’s just wishing me a happy belated birthday,” Thomas said.
But when Thomas answered the phone, she sensed that something was off.
“Her tone of voice was very odd,” Thomas said. Instead of being her normal cheerful self, Mullady was more reserved, as if she had something big to get off her chest.
She then dropped a bomb.
After 13 storied seasons leading the Springfield College women’s lacrosse team, Mullady told Thomas that she was stepping away from the position to be closer to her family. Thomas was one of the first people to find out.
Initially, the news shocked Thomas. She thought back to her years as a player, and how it was the end of an era at Springfield. But Mullady had an ulterior motive. During the hour-long conversation, it became clear why she had called Thomas.
“She started dropping hints like, ‘Well, it’s gonna be open soon,’” Thomas said. “I was just like, ‘Okay,’ but I didn’t really pick up on it because I was so focused on everything she accomplished, telling her thank you, etc. Then, she was like, ‘Well, if you want to apply for [the job], I think you’d be great there.’”
Thomas was at a crossroads. For one, she had just had two successful seasons at Johnson and Wales, following up the 2021 campaign by being honored as the GNAC Coach of the Year in 2022. But this was an opportunity that Thomas didn’t think she could pass up.
After much thought, and some persuasion from Mullady, Thomas agreed to return to Alden Street, ready to start a new chapter.
But the storyline was painfully familiar.
In October, less than a month after starting her new job, Thomas contracted COVID again. Immediately, she relapsed. Her legs became weaker, and the pain returned. Her GBS was back.
On average, 3,000 to 6,000 people get GBS a year. Of those who do, only 2-5% of them relapse.
Thomas was scared. She had already fought off the syndrome once, and felt unprepared to do it again. She also didn’t want to leave her new job before she had really started it.
Thomas called her doctor at Lawrence and Memorial Hospital to inform him. He urged her to come in the following day for a check up, and when she did, he gave Thomas an ultimatum.
“You can either start treatment right now and go through the same process as the first time, or you can wait it out,” he said.
The decision was easy for Thomas.
“Something in my gut just told me to wait it out and trust my body,” Thomas said. “And I did. It was painful, but I just wanted to focus on being a new coach at Springfield, being back here and teaching my class.”
Thomas was also looking forward to something else too big to miss – a rematch against WestConn. When the day of the game finally came, however, she realized once again that she had to beat herself.
The WestConn program was running the same offense as it did under Thomas’ control. Although she was calling out the opposing plays before they even happened, Thomas still found her team down by three at the end of the third quarter.
When she entered the huddle, Thomas faced a team without momentum. WestConn had just scored four consecutive goals, ripping the lead away from Springfield. But Thomas wasn’t ready to give up.
She decided to make two huge changes: replace her goalkeeper and draw specialist.
And it worked.
The crowd at Stagg Field erupted as Jade O’Connor’s eighth goal of the game found the back of the net, this one coming in the waning minutes of overtime to cement the win. The two moves that Thomas had made worked flawlessly. Springfield dominated the draws in the fourth quarter, 7-2. Haley Moody, the replacement goalie, came up with a huge save at the end of regulation and a ground-ball turnover that set up O’Connor’s goal.
Thomas had done it. She had both bet on herself and beaten herself. Again.
She got the win against her former team by finding a way to outsmart herself and her own offense. When her body fought itself, Thomas didn’t back down.
It’s the only way Thomas knows how to live.
“[GBS] will always be in the back of my mind,” Thomas said. “But it’s not something that defines me.”